Very impressive vocabulary there, and yet the only way your point holds water is if you stipulate that juveniles don't know that murder is wrong. That's got nothing to do with data and functionality. That's strictly a logical requirement you've imposed with your argument and I'm very sorry that the requirement is incredibly stupid and flies in the face of all reality.
Education is a wonderful thing, but occasionally it does help to step back and realize the sort of nonsense it can lead you to if you're not paying attention. Gotta come up to reality for a gulp of air every once in a while.
You play logic in the wrong ballpark.
You build on the assumption that the difference between being able to follow a law or not is whether you can quote the law or not. Human beings doesn't work that way. What matters is how an individual subjectively perceive the world and how the mind that perceive the world has developed.
Three forces here are autonomy, relatedness and personal constructs. We all have personal constructs in how we grasp the world and our relationship with our world is pretty much based on these constructs. The older you are, the more constructs you have and the wider is your perception. Abstract thought begin to form in the early teens and continue to form after that. What a teenager do not have is autonomy, their framework of subjective consciousness is very narrow, it's their school, their family, classmates etc. At this age they are pretty much shoved around by adults. That's where relatedness comes in. Teenagers are pretty much living within the adults of their lives and their classmates. They usually have no choice in going anywhere else. They have very little control over their lives. Whoever is in their surroundings are people they relate to in some way or another.
Due to the way our society works, 18 is usually an age where society decides an individual is autonomous. That means that their world suddenly becomes much larger. They have to form their own relationships, they engage in new places, they pick courses at the university or jobs, they get their own place to live, they have to take care of themselves.
The difference between how these two tick in their consciousness are pretty huge. The teenager is very much a flipper ball where as the young adult floats on the ocean and have to paddle somewhere to get somewhere.
This is why teenagers aren't in their capacity to control their actions, their frame of reference is very limited, ultimately in the hands of their environment. Therefore it's also a very high chance something will go wrong. It's also why the environment is more responsible at that age than when they get older.
