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Capital Punishment of Juveniles The death penalty has been an everyday occurrence in Western civilization for more than two thousand years. Not until two centuries ago, however, its use and abuse was seriously challenged in Italy, France, and England. Since then capital punishment has been a steady topic of debates in Europe as well as in the United States. The Eighth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution prohibits the imposition of "cruel and unusual punishment. " Either the imposition of a particular sentence, or the conduct of corrections officials in carrying out a sentence, may be challenged under the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment (72 Cases Avoid Capital Penalty 10).
Since the 1972 landmark case of Furman v. Georgia numerous Supreme Court cases have considered whether the imposition of the death penalty, either absolutely or under certain circumstances, may violate this Eighth Amendment prohibition. Roper v. Simmons, a watershed case involving Christopher Simmons, a youngster who had spent on Missouri's death row nearly a decade after being convicted of a particularly gruesome murder committed when he was 17 years old. But in 2003, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the juvenile death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, and after the appealing, the U. S.
Supreme Court agreed to take the case. Thus, it prohibits the execution of offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed. This decision overrules the Supreme Court's own prior decision 16 years earlier in the case of Stanford v. Kentucky, and continues the court's recent trend to narrow the availability of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment (Abramsky 16).
In such a way despite a judiciary increasingly dominated by conservative appointees, the federal courts have shown a heartening willingness to rein in the death penalty. Four years ago, the American Supreme Court, by a vote of 6 to 3, halted the practice of executing mentally retarded prisoners, declaring it unconstitutional in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) (Bedau 104). Most experts believe it will be impossible for the Court to avoid a decision barring the execution of juveniles when the justices make their ruling public (Eddlem 30). "All the measures are exceeded, " says Adam Ortiz, who works on the issue for the American Bar Association. Ortiz is referring to the fact that the same "measures" the Court cited in barring execution of the mentally retarded hold true for juveniles in light of the new scientific comprehension of the adolescent brain. Together, these developments represent the biggest shift away from capital punishment since the practice was briefly abolished in the country between 1972 and 1976. "This is the cutting edge of the death-penalty-reform movement, " says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.
It is also a amazing turnaround from the prevailing view on the Supreme Court in the late 1980 s. In two seminal cases - Thompson v. Oklahoma (1988) and Stanford v. Kentucky (1989) - the justices conserved the juvenile death penalty but left open the door to re-examine it if society norms, or "standards of politeness, " altered in the years to come. "Since then, the standards of decency have indeed changed.
A moral consensus is emerging that holds out room for the possible vindication of teenage criminals, even those convicted of particularly brutal murders, or at the very least one that judges the procedures of immature teenagers by a slightly different moral calculator than that used for mature adults; that recognizes new scientific evidence on how the adolescent brain functions; and that seeks to understand, if not excuse, why some adolescents are prone to acts of extreme violence" (Rankin 198). Owing to the above factors Americans more and more favor prison terms, including life without parole, over death for juveniles convicted of capital murder. In 2003, only two people in the United States were sent to death row for crimes performed in the period they were minors, down from seven in 2000. Though the quantity of Americans executed for crimes committed when they were minors has always been tiny compared to the number of adults executed, the punishment finally "seems to be out of style and it seems to be disappearing, " says Steiker (537). "It's like an endangered species. " Today, 20 states permit the execution of someone accused of a crime committed when he or she was younger than 18. Of these, the Death Penalty Information Center estimates that 12 currently have juvenile offenders on death row, most of them in the South with the exception of Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona; Texas leads the field with 28 people waiting for execution for crimes committed when they were 17 years old (Bedau & Cassell 94). But a mere seven states have actually carried out such an execution since 1976.
Florida, for example, hasn't carried a capital punishment of juvenile offender since 1954; Arizona since 1934; and Alabama, which has 14 juvenile criminals on its death row and which allows teenagers as young as 16 to be executed, since 1961 (Haines 112). In fact, 89 percent of Americans live in states that have not executed a juvenile for more than 10 years, thus confirming the situation that prosecutors are apparently reluctant to require the death penalty against juveniles even in states where they can (Adelman 60). Not surprisingly, many juvenile executions that have occurred have been in the single state of Texas (eight out of 13 since 1999), many of them are the executions in the infamous "convict-'em-and-execute-'em" Harris County. Yet when Texas geared up two years ago to execute Napoleon Beazley, an African American convicted of killing a white man during a botched carjacking in 1994 when the former was 17 years old, 18 state legislators spoke out contra the capital punishment, and Judge Cynthia Kent, who had presided over Beazley's trial, created a letter for Governor Rick Perry urging him to commute the sentence. Professional organizations such as the American Bar Association and the American Psychiatric Association called for a halt to such killings, pointing out that only 4 countries all over the world- Pakistan, Iran, the United States, and Congo - recognize having executed juveniles in the years since 2000 (Lyons 58).
Ultimately unsuccessful, the campaign gathered steam even after Beazley was put to death by lethal injection. Newspapers across the country and human-rights organizations around the world declared his execution a travesty. "Widespread opprobrium moved state senators to vote to ban the juvenile death penalty. The House failed to follow suit only after the governor intervened in support of preserving such executions" (B. V. & Morris 136).
In the years prior to Beazley's execution, Montana and Indiana had passed laws banning juvenile executions. Later South Dakota and Wyoming have also barred the punishment (Lyons 57). And just before Christmas of 2001, defenders of the juvenile death penalty received yet another setback, this time in Virginia. In one of the highest-profile capital-murder cases of recent times, a jury insisted not to impose the capital punishment on Lee Boyd Male, the teenage trigger man in the notorious Washington, D.
C. , sniper killings. What made the decision all the more improbable was the fact that Attorney General John Ashcroft had gone out of his way to secure a trial in Virginia precisely because Virginia juries were always ready to vote for capital punishment in cases where the defendant was a minor at the time the crimes occurred (Adelman 60). Weeks earlier, another Virginia jury had elected to sentence adult sniper John Allen Muhammad to death for the killing spree. The Virginia verdicts appear to reflect a broader view based on the basis of various polls and studies of jurors in other capital cases: While a majority of Americans continue to support capital punishment for adults, a broad-based consensus is developing against the practice of executing juveniles. Recent research by criminologists from Northeastern University's Capital Jury Project and the University of Delaware determined that just 18 % of juries recommended the death penalty when a capital defendant was younger than 18 at the time of his or her crime.
When the defendant was 18, only 34 percent of juries imposed a death sentence. But when a defendant was older than 18, nearly 55 % and 65 % of juries handed down death sentences. In 2002, a national Gallup Poll estimated that barely a quarter of all Americans favored the penalty for minors (Juveniles and the Death Penalty 18). The recent shifts in public opinion may be informed by advances in brain-imaging techniques and scientists' explanations of the structure and work of the adult brain.
In the 1960 s, Harvard neurologist Paul Ivan Yakovlev began using a new staining technique on a collection of more than 1, 500 brains from deceased people of various ages. His aim was to study how the brain continues to acquire fatty insulation, or myelin, as it is worked in the period of childhood and adolescence. The insulation helps the brain's ability to transmit information; to understand the past, present, and future; and to interpret its surroundings. Absent such insulation, the brain is restricted in how well it can interpret complex data and self-censor basic impulses-including violent ones.
Yakovlev's findings, being contrary to some other theories, illustrated that the brains don't stop to evolve well beyond childhood (Abramsky 25). With more recent advances in magnetic resonance imaging, brain scans on living subjects have become far more sophisticated, allowing neuroscientist's to develop detailed maps of how the brain changes over time, which parts of the brain modified on the first place, and which parts become mature in the period of early adulthood (Steiker, C. S. , & Steiker 544). "Until you are 18, the brain is changing, " explains Ruben Gut, a neuro psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. "And those parts of the brain that come on board last, that myelin ate last, are exactly those parts of the brain that do the functions considered to be related to criminal culpability. The last parts of the brain to become myelin ated are the frontal lobes and cortes - the thinking parts of the brain. "For the vast majority of children, a good communal network, parental advice, and the presence of teachers, mentors, and minders serve as a sort of societal substitute for the functions of the fully developed frontal cortex.
In some children, however, that substitute is so absent or twisted - through neglect or abuse - that the child has no inhibitors to severe acts of violence" (Abramsky 21). Overwhelmingly, say neuro psychologists, these are the young people who are most at risk of ending up on death row. That doesn't mean that such children shouldn't be punished -- and, when necessary, incarcerated for long periods -- in order to protect society from their cruel actions. "What it does mean, on the other hand, is that complicating factors may exist that should be given serious weight during the sentencing phase of any capital case involving a juvenile" (Lyons 80). Both because of new scientific understanding and because of a greater communal sensitivity to the challenges faced by injured, disturbed young people, one day soon the juvenile death punishment may be "a sorrowful anachronism, as antithetical to American values of fairness and justice as the burning of witches seems today" (B. V. & Morris 72). Hours before Napoleon Beazley died in Texas' execution chamber, he released his final report. "The act I committed to put me here was not just heinous, it was senseless, " the condemned man wrote, his appeals all used up, his time on earth galloping away. "But the person that committed that act is no longer here -- I am.
I'm not going to struggle physically against any restraints, I'm not going to shout, use profanity or make idle threats. Understand though that I'm not only upset, but I'm saddened by what is happening here tonight. I'm not only saddened, but disappointed that a system that is supposed to protect and uphold what is just and right can be so much like me when I made the same disgraceful mistake" (cited in Abramsky 22). References 72 Cases Avoid Capital Penalty; Court's Ruling Spares Youths. (2005, March 2). The Washington Times, p. A 10.
Abramsky, S. (2004, July). Taking Juveniles off Death Row: This Year the Supreme Court Will Hear Arguments over Whether the Juvenile Death Penalty Is Unconstitutional. If It Decides So, the Court Will Be on the Cutting Edge of Death-Penalty Reform. The American Prospect, 15. Adelman, S. E. (2005, August).
Supreme Court Bans Death Penalty for Under- 18 Offenders. Corrections Today, 67. Bedau, H. A. (1977).
The Courts, the Constitution, and Capital Punishment. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Bedau, H. A. & Cassell, P.
G. (Eds. ). (2004). Debating the Death Penalty: Should America Have Capital Punishment? The Experts on Both Sides Make Their Best Case. New York: Oxford University Press. Eddlem, T. R. (2005, April 4).
Supreme Arrogance: In One of Its Rulings, the Supreme Court Has Once Again Stepped beyond Its Legal Bounds, Ending Capital Punishment for People under 18 Years Old. Adding Insult to Injury, the Court Explicitly Cited Foreign Sources in the Main Text of Its Decision. The New American, 21. Haines, H. H. (1996).
Against Capital Punishment The Anti-Death Penalty Movement in America, 1972 - 1994. New York: Oxford University Press. It's Time for Us to Speak Up on Capital Punishment. (2003, January 31). The Washington Times, p. B 02.
Joyce, J. A. (1961). Capital Punishment: A World View. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons.
Juveniles and the Death Penalty. (2002, September 2). The Washington Times, p. A 18. Lyons, D. (2000, May). Capital Punishment on Trial. State Legislatures, 26, 14.
B. V. & Morris, C. (Eds. ). (1997). Capital Punishment in the United States A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Rankin, J.
H. (1979). Changing Attitudes Toward Capital Punishment. Social Forces, 58 (1), 194 - 211. Steiker, C. S. , & Steiker, J.
M. (2005). The Seduction of Innocence: The Attraction and Limitations of the Focus on Innocence in Capital Punishment Law and Advocacy. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 95 (2).
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Research essay sample on Capital Punishment Of Juveniles
