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Juvenile Capital Punishment

Since 1985, a total of twenty-two people who were under the age of 18 at the time they committed murder have been executed. The Supreme Court of the United States has thus far deemed it constitutional to execute a person even though he was only a child at the time he or she has committed certain offenses.

However, in the not so distant future, juvenile execution in the United States might be brought to a temporary or perhaps permanent end. The United States Supreme Court will be hearing the case of Roper v. Simmons in the not too distant future. Indeed, the United States Supreme Court will hand down a decision in this case within the coming year.

The case involves a minor boy named Christopher Simmons, who resided in Missouri. Simmons was 17 at the time of the crime. This case likely is to be the political hot potato during the next term of the United States Supreme Court. Capital punishment itself is a divisive issue in the United States; however, even many people who support the death penalty generally have reservations about imposing the death penalty on a juvenile offender.

International law and norms have long disfavored the juvenile death penalty. In recent years China, Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have outlawed executing juvenile offenders. There are only two countries on the planet the currently execute juvenile offenders. These countries are the United States and Iran.

Currently twelve states have seventy-three inmates under sentence of death who were juveniles at the time of the crime, one-third reside in Texas. Texas continues to seek execution dates for juveniles on death row despite the pending case before the Supreme Court.

In reversing Christopher Simmons' death sentence the Missouri Supreme Court that the juvenile death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment's "evolving standards of decency" test rather than basing their holding on state constitutional grounds.

There is a strong argument that the Missouri Supreme Court correctly applied the "evolving standards test." Further, in a significant development since certiorari was granted in Simmons, South Dakota and Wyoming enacted laws prohibiting the juvenile death penalty. Now 31 states prohibit the death penalty for juveniles (including 12 states that prohibit the death penalty under all circumstances).

Additionally, the number of juveniles sentenced to death has consistently been dropping in the past decade. Two juveniles were sentenced to death in 2003, one of whom, a sixteen-year-old Alabama boy, had virtually no mitigation case presented.

In a May 2002 Gallup poll, 69 percent of Americans opposed executing juveniles. While public opinion in and of itself is not what underpins the so-called "evolving standards of decency," the sentiment in the country against juvenile execution does appear to support a judicial movement away from such a severe penalty being imposed against a child. The consideration of banning juvenile execution has been moving somewhat in tandem to those cases seeking to limit or stop outright the execution of people with chronic intellectual impairments.

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