Flawed research predicting remorseless teen killers led to life sentences.

Correcting the Myth of the Superpredator Retro Report on PBS

Premiered October 29, 2019
Correcting the Myth of the Superpredator

States are reconsidering life prison sentences of people who were given mandatory life terms as juveniles – a practice since ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. At the time, in the 1990s, a handful of researchers inspired panic with a dire but flawed prediction: the imminent arrival of  a new breed of remorseless teen killers, so-called superpredators.

About the Program

Retro Report on PBS

Retro Report makes sense of the present by revealing the past. Join journalists Celeste Headlee and Masud Olufani as they connect the present to the past through four distinct and varied stories, and New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz adds his signature wit.

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