Law and .Human Behavior, Vol. 17, No. 5, 1993 Grade Related Changes in Young People' Reasoning About Plea Decisions* S Michele Peterson-BadalVf and Rona Abramovitch~ The present study examined the development of young people's ability to reason about legal issues involved in a plea decision in a criminal matter. Forty-eight subjects in each of grades 5, 7, and 9, and 48 young adults participated in a semistructured interview containing four vignettes, each depicting a young person who had committed a criminal offense, was charged, and retained a lawyer. Subjects received information regarding the charge and the prosecution's evidence (weak in half of the vi- gnettes and strong in the other half). Subjects were asked to decide what they would plead if they were in the defendant's shoes, and to justify their choices. Contrary to prediction, a majority of even the Grade 5 subjects based their plea decisions on legal rather than moral criteria. Nonetheless, there were significant grade-related changes both in legal reasoning scores and in the use of guilt-based plea justifications. In addition, according to a panel of lawyers, subjects' plea choices were rated as more reasonable when the evidence against the story character was strong (and thus congruent with "moral" guilt) than when it was weak. This difference diminished with grade as subjects became better able to separate moral from legal issues in their decision making. There has been a growing recognition in the legal community (e.g., Leon, 1978; Ramsey, 1983) that certain cognitive and emotional capacities must be present if young people are to effectively and meaningfully participate in the legal system. This issue is particularly critical in North American juvenile criminal law, where * This research was conducted by the fast author in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral program in the Department of Education (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), University of Toronto. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Artemis Papadakis and of all the students and school personnel who so generously gave their time, knowledge, and resources. Re- quests for reprints should be sent to Michele Peterson-Badali, who is now at the Dr. R.G.N. Laidlaw Centre, Institute of Child Study, Faculty of Education, University of Toronto, 45 Walmer Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5R 2X2. i" Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. ~: University of Toronto. 537 0147-7307/93/1000-0537507.00/0 9 1993 Plenum Publishing Corporation