Disconnecting the Dots

I saw this in the newspaper the other day, both articles on the same page. The first story said that a scientist of some sort has discovered that the reason teenagers have so many more accidents than older drivers is because their brains are not fully developed. Specifically, the part of the brain that deals with impulse control is immature, this guy says, until a person is in their early to mid-twenties.
The second article was about Antonin Scalia and his robe-rending dissent from the Supreme Court decision that put an end to the execution of minors. Kids, as Scalia would have us know, are just as evil as any other murderer, and thus must be punished just so.
Nowhere on that page of the Chicago Tribune, nor on any other page, did anyone connect the two stories. On the one hand, we have some scientific proof that teenagers act without thinking, and thus are probably incapable of meeting the legal standard for premeditation--that is, they cannot fully understand the consequences of their actions, because their brains are developed in such a way as to hinder forethought. On the other hand, a man who is just a step away from becoming America's top judge is telling us that juveniles fit the same category as adult offenders, and is implying that legal principles are entirely divorced from developments in the society that created them (unless, of course, you think the law just appears out of nowhere or, worse, falls directly from God's mouth--a perversion of reason too insane to address here). This is, remember, the same guy who declared that innocence of a crime is not a good enough reason to grant a retrial to a wrongly-convicted felon.
What the fuck is going on here?