356
Opinion of the Court
petitioner had become angry with her one afternoon in 1986, he threatened her with an axe. There were other incidents, of less gravity, before 1986. One of petitioner's classmates testified that petitioner cut him with a piece of glass while they were in the seventh grade. Another classmate testified that petitioner also cut him with glass just a year later, and there was additional evidence presented that petitioner had stabbed a third classmate with a pencil.
The State established that the crimes committed in 1986 were not petitioner's first experience with the criminal justice system. Petitioner had been convicted in 1985 of a store burglary in Waco, Texas. Petitioner twice violated the terms of probation for that offense by smoking marijuana. Petitioner was still on probation when he committed the Huddleston murder.
The defense presented petitioner's father, Dorsie Johnson, Sr., as its only witness. The elder Johnson attributed his son's criminal activities to his drug use and his youth. When asked by defense counsel whether his son at the age of 19 was "a real mature person," petitioner's father answered:
"No, no. Age of nineteen? No, sir. That, also, I find to be a foolish age. That's a foolish age. They tend to want to be macho, built-up, trying to step into manhood. You're not mature-lized for it." Id., at 27.
At the close of his testimony, Johnson summarized the role that he thought youth had played in his son's crime:
"[A]ll I can say is I still think that a kid eighteen or nineteen years old has an undeveloped mind, undeveloped sense of assembling not—I don't say what is right or wrong, but the evaluation of it, how much, you know, that might be—well, he just don't—he just don't evaluate what is worth—what's worth and what's isn't like he should like a thirty or thirty-five year old man would. He would take under consideration a lot of things that a younger person that age wouldn't." Id., at 47.
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