The Death Penalty for Juveniles

Context

1. Notion of death penalty

1.1. historical facts
1.2. main ways of capital punishment

2. Execution of juveniles

2.1. situation in different states
2.2. common and different problems and attitudes

3. Legislation of death penalty for juveniles

3.1. international situation
3.2. in the USA

4. Conclusion

The death penalty is also called capital punishment. In this case the word “capital” means the person’s head, in the past people were executed by taking off their head from their body. The history of capital punishment is rather long, one of the first laws concerning it was met in the eighteenth century B.C. in the Code of King of Hammaurabi of Babylon. Nowadays such things as marrying a Jew or not confessing to a crime would probably not considered being worth a person’s life, but there were times when these were considered to be rather hard offenses and were punished this way. The Twentieth Century is known for the “Progressive Period” of the reforms in the USA. The atmosphere was rather intense as people in the USA were afraid of the influence of the Russian Revolution. Later the USA took part in the World War 1 and the result were the social conflicts between socialists and capitalists. As a result, “five of the six abolitionist states reinstated their death penalty by 1920” (3).
There are several main methods of death penalty, which were invented within the whole history of this practice, among them:
- Hanging: this method is considered humane as the neck is broken usually very quickly, but if the distance is too great, the rope will tear his head off.
- Electric chair: it is hard to say what experiences a person being executed this way. The two cases are known, where prisoners lived for 4 to 10 minutes before finally being dead.
- Firing squad: Death comes quickly, if the killers don’t miss. In the U.S., this method was used only Utah. Later it was changed for lethal injection as a more humane method.
- Poison gas: Cyanide is dropped into acid and then they get the Hydrogen Cyanide, a gas, which actually kills a human being. A person experiences several minutes of agony and then dies.
- Lethal injection: the prisoner is strapped to the table in a special room and lethal drugs are injected into him. If properly conducted, the prisoner quickly becomes unconscious. This method is becoming more and more popular.
- Guillotine: A famous French invention was never used in North America. After the neck is severed a person dies very quickly.
- Stoning: “The prisoner is often buried up to his neck and pelted with rocks until they eventually die. Not used in North America, but used in some Muslim countries as a penalty for murder, adultery and other crimes”
“The use of death penalty in America was under the influence of Britain. The Europeans coming to the new world were bringing the practice of capital punishment with them. The reason for executing Kendall, in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608 was the suspect that he was a spy for Spain” (2).
The problem of death penalty is certainly vital not only for government or juridical system, this an important social issue, and there are certainly a lot of presentations of it from different sides and points of view of all people. It is hard to present some one-sided opinion concerning the death penalty relating to adult people, but it is even harder to treat the matter of capital punishment of youngsters.
The Twentieth Century is known for the “Progressive Period” of the reforms in the USA. The atmosphere was rather intense as people in the USA were afraid of the influence of the Russian Revolution. Later the USA took part in the World War 1 and the result were the social conflicts between socialists and capitalists. As a result, “five of the six abolitionist states reinstated their death penalty by 1920” (2).
The execution of juveniles began in 1642 with Thomas Graunger from Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. Since that year we know about 366 juvenile offenders who were punished this way. They took place in 38 states and they contribute as 2% to the total 20.000 executions in America since 1608. Twenty – two on them took place in the years between 1973-2003, this is about 2.6 % of total executions within this period of time. Actually all the offenders were 17 years old at the moment of conducting their crimes, there was only one boy of 16 – Sean Sellers from Oklahoma. Nowadays it is enough to mention that about 45% were whites, in comparison to adults less, as among them we get the number of 57%. Their victims were of 81% white people. The issue of race is not new as already in the nineteenth century some states even worsened the situation by applying some special laws concerning death penalty towards slaves. In 1838 the tendency to use some special places for execution instead of making it in public developed. The reforms in 1838 in Tennessee, and later in Alabama brought enactment of discretionary death penalty statutes. “This introduction of sentencing discretion in the capital process was perceived as a victory for abolitionists because prior to the enactment of these statutes, all states mandated the death penalty for anyone convicted of a capital crime, regardless of circumstances. With the exception of a small number of rarely committed crimes in a few jurisdictions, all mandatory capital punishment laws had been abolished by 1963.” (6).
All these offenders were waiting for their death about 6-20 years and thus were actually executed at the age of 23-38. If to compare the percentage of juvenile executions in the states, the statistics shows that in Texas about 59% of these executions were carried out, in Virginia – about 14% and in Oklahoma – 9%, these three states make together 81% of all juvenile executions.
In America juvenile death penalty is authorized by 22 separate state jurisdictions, it is clear that each of them goes its own way, that’s why most of the practices in different states are not alike, but there are some points that could be considered more of less common for the whole country.
The examples of them would be:
- America is known for its violent juvenile crimes, especially homicide and the situation is worse than in other countries
- The mid 1990s brought the increase of juvenile homicides, nowadays the statistics shows the decrease of them, but still the level of public fear of juvenile homicides stays really high after those times.
- Juvenile murders are characterized by absence of responsibility to civilized entreaties stopping the killing.
- Some political leaders are insisting on making the punishment for juvenile crimes harder
- The most important step to be taken in order to stop or at least decrease the juvenile crimes is to correct the social conditions of life.
As people are concerned about this issue, there are certainly some common arguments against applying of death penalty towards juveniles.
- the researches prove that most of the teenagers who commit these crimes had really hard life conditions during their childhood. These conditions and problems do influence their characters and behavior when they get older.
- Some medical researches show that the brains of children do not mature organically before they are in their early twenties, the last thing they usually are able to develop is their impulse control.
- Usually teenagers have little understanding of the death and they see themselves as immortals and thus the capital punishment can not deter them from committing even a serious crime.
- Such way of punishment is not the best solution of the problem itself as the really effective solutions would demand the cleaning up the schools and societal structures, which are generating violent teenagers, able to commit crimes.

It is a commonly accepted idea that children under the age of 18 can not be compared to adults as they are not able to function as adults. This is one of the main reasons why the juridical system tries to find the correct ways to protect children in case they do their wrong choices and to provide the second chance for them. People under 18 are not taking part in voting, they do not have to go to the military service, but still in some states the laws subscribe the death penalty for their crimes even of they didn’t reach their adulthood. The Supreme Court of the USA prohibits executing children under the age of 15.
There is a ban in the Constitution concerning “cruel and unusual punishment” and an important question was for the Supreme Court of the USA whether the death punishment of a child of sixteen – seventeen could be considered breaking this ban. This bright discussion started after the death sentence of Christopher Simmons, who was only 17.
We all know that teenagers are usually aware of their actions, but some recent medical researches prove that they can not be as well accountable as adults. “Studies by the Harvard Medical School, the National Institute of Mental Health and the UCLA’s Department of Neuroscience finds that the frontal and pre-frontal lobes of the brain, which regulate impulse control and judgment, are not fully developed in adolescents” (4). The development is actually completed when a person is about 18-22 years old. The adolescents are usually more impulsive, they usually make strict judgements about events and people in their lives, they are neither completely aware of all the consequences of their actions.
There are even cases when because of their immaturity the teenagers are easily influenced by the adult criminals, there are also examples when the adolescents are taken advantage of during some investigations. They are luckily to give out confessions which are not true, in case they are intimidated by adults and authority people. They think little about their Miranda Rights, about their right of legal representation.
Very important fact is that the goals of death penalty can not be applied to teenagers, they are really capable of rehabilitation and as they are emotionally immature, they can not be considered to be the “worst of the worse”.
In general the public opinion in the USA is against the execution of juvenile offenders. In 2003 about 69% of people are against the death penalty towards juveniles, about 22% voted for executing the young criminals, and 5% of people couldn’t not come out with their opinion.
Most of the other countries consider the capital punishment of juveniles inhumane and anachronistic. “The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights bans the execution of juvenile offenders. Although the United States has signed the ICCPR and therefore agreed to be bound by its standards, the U.S. has reserved the right to execute juvenile offenders as long as our Constitution is interpreted to permit the practice” (1).
Nowadays only 123 countries use death penalty and among them all only USA and Iraq apply capital punishment to juveniles. In the year 2003 the authorities of Iraq started to consider the bill which will be supposed to arise the age of the criminals who could be sentenced to death from fifteen to eighteen. Children under eighteen won’t be convicted to long life imprisonment or lashing. We know that such countries as Yemen, Chine, Zimbabwe, wrote the laws prohibiting death penalty toward juveniles. In the year 2000, Pakistan “moved to outlaw the execution of juvenile offenders under the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance” (3). But in November 2001 Ali Sher was executed for the crime he committed at the age of 13. After this case the President Musharrah changed the death penalty of about 100 juveniles to imprisonment. Later on the Supreme Court of the country provided the decision to “peruse and define laws relating to the imposition of the death sentence (on) young people.” (3).
The domestic law of Chine also prohibits the death penalty towards juveniles, but in 2003 Zhao Lin was executed for the crime he committed when he was only 16.
The United Nations Convention (Article 37(a)) does not provide that - capital punishment and life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age. The United States is the only country in the world that has not yet ratified this international agreement, in large part because of our desire to remain free to retain the death penalty for juvenile offenders” (4).
However the USA is the only country since 1998 which executed juveniles regularly and the country is know for the number of executions which exceeds the number of executions in all other nations combined.
It was already mentioned that many researches showed that juveniles are less mature and less culpable than grown- up people. At this age the cognitive abilities, emotions, impulse control, the sense of identity, brains are only at their development stage. Thus we come to the conclusion that juveniles are not only physically but morally as well are much different from adults. The “extent of change that can occur in the (adolescent) brain...” has been heralded as “one (of) the most remarkable findings in neuro-biology of the last decade…” (National Research Council, 1999).
Most of the juvenile offenders had the bad experience of moral or physical abuse, suffered from sexual abuse or drug addiction, which certainly caused not only physical but also psychological trauma for them, and their reasons of committing crimes could be hidden somewhere inside of the forming personality, and thus in many cases the goals of the crimes are not any kind of financial perspectives, but often some moral issues, thought it can not be considered a rule for all juveniles crimes.
The USA has also started to take some steps to avoid the death penalty to juveniles, the start was done with the raise of statutory minimum level up to eighteen instead of sixteen. One of the first states to do that were Kansas and New York in 1994-1995. In 1999 Montana provided the legislation to raise the minimum age to 18, In Indiana it was done only in 2002. At the same time the similar statutes appeared in Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Texas.
However there are 13 jurisdictions in America, which are without capital punishment at all: Alaska, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Thus since the year 1989, when the Supreme Court of the USA for the first time considered the matter of executing the youngsters under the age of eighteen considerable changes were made. Sixteen states imposed the death penalty for juveniles and plus the twelve states and Washington DC prohibit the death penalty completely make up totally 28 states, where the death penalty towards juveniles is prohibited. Just a fact for comparison – in 1989 only eleven states prohibited capital punishment to juveniles.
The Constitution provides the right to low the age of execution from eighteen to seventeen and even sixteen, but since the year 1989 there was not a single state that actually did it.
22 states permit death penalty of juveniles, but in reality in the years 1989-2003 only six of them made such executions: Missouri, Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Oklahoma, Louisiana, out of them only three are know for death executions after 1993 – Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma. It is important to underline the fact that in almost all states executions of juveniles are so rare that they are considered really unusual and have more hypothetic character than real.
In 2003 bills against capital punishment appeared in 14 states, actually none of them was successful. In February 2004 in 12 states the bills were introduced which prohibited the death penalty to juvenile offenders: Alabama ,Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Wyoming.
Overall, the issue of death penalty has a long and controversial history worldwide. In the past such crimes were punished that way that we can nowadays hardly believe that it is the truth. Now most of the countries tend to consider the death penalty inappropriate way of punishment because of many reasons, as it is considered to be immortal or inhumane deed, which in reality doesn’t deter crimes and so on. The problem of juvenile offenders and application of capital punishment to them is even a more sophisticated problem, which is step by step solved through abolishing of such punishment of people under 18 years old. The supporters of the capital punishment could say that sometimes teenagers are even crueller that adults, but still the society has to take responsibility for their lives and we should never forget that this way of punishment can deter neither adult crimes nor juvenile crimes.

Sources:

1. Supreme Court Abolishes Juvenile Executions, By Charles Lane, Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 2, 2005 pp.1-6

2. http://www.aclu.org/capital/juv/

3. Death Penalty for Juveniles?, John Wide, Justice, Nov 5, 2002 pp. 2-4

4. The Constitutionality of the Juvenile Death Penalty, Harold White, 2004 pp.2-45

5. http://justice.uaa.alaska.edu/death/issues.html

6. Crime and Law Enforcement Issues and Death Penalty, J.Davidson, 2000. pp. 6-9