Deegan S2, Broomhall L1
1PsychCheck, 2Flinders University
Biography:
Simone was admitted to practise as a barrister and solicitor in the Supreme Court of South Australia in 2004. Her research interests include serious youth offending, repeat incarceration and the prison. Simone’s doctorate, The Lives and Adjustment Patterns of Juvenile Lifers (2019) investigated opportunities for life-sentenced juveniles to cope, adjust and mature in prison environments and was awarded the Flinders University Vice Chancellors Medal for Doctoral Thesis Excellence (2020).
Luke Broomhall is a Forensic Psychologist in private practice. He has worked extensively with juveniles and adults in sexual and offending and provides expert medico-legal assessments and reports for courts.
This paper explores the common law doctrine of joint criminal enterprise (‘JCE’) and extended joint criminal enterprise (‘EJCE’), as narrated by juveniles convicted of murder in South Australia. Specifically, as a means to come to grips with the appropriateness of applying JCE and EJCE to cases involving children and young people, the article reports the involvement of juveniles convicted as secondary parties. Accordingly, the juveniles had no murderous intent at the time the victims were killed by another person. To some extent, these cases revolve around not so much what people did but around concepts crucially related to awareness and foresight. Through interview excerpts, we explicate the social and psychological dimensions of the mindset where young men do not back down from fights: rather, they go headlong into them to show their mettle. At the same time, we raise questions about the scope and breadth of that limited awareness and foresight, with particular reference to neurobiological and developmental aspects of decision-making. We conclude with some brief suggestions for future research.