Execution Of Juveniles Essay Research Paper Adult

Execution Of Juveniles Essay, Research Paper

Adult Punishment and Juvenile Justice

Day after day in this country there is a debate going

on about the death penalty and whether we as people have the

right to decide the fate of another persons life. When we

examine this issue we usually consider those we are arguing

about to be older men and women who are more than likely

hardened criminals with rap sheets longer than the height we

stand (Farley & Willwerth, 1998). They have made a career of

crime, committing it rather than studying it, and somewhere

along the line a jury of their peers decided enough was

enough. They were handed down the most severe and most

final punishment of them all, death. Behind all of the

controversy that this issue raises lies a different group of

people that are not so often brought into the lime light,

juveniles. This proposes a problem entangled with another;

if we do decide to carry out death sentences, what is the

minimum age limit? Can we electrocute, lethally inject, or

gas any one who commits a crime that is considered capital?

In this paper the issue of capital punishment for

juveniles will be discussed, basically laying out a

comprehensive look at the matter. First we will briefly

look at the history of both juvenile justice and the history

of the death penalty in regards to juveniles. Secondly we

will take a short look at the two major court cases that

dealt with this issue in the United States. Next this paper

will present the factual statistics of the death penalty for

juveniles and also take a look at our country’s stance on

the issue in the international arena. We will then spend a

short time looking at some views on the juvenile death

penalty, reasons for the death penalty itself, and the

arguments for and against the death penalty for juveniles.

Lastly we will conclude with a few thoughts about the issue

and the implications that we might have to consider.

The history of the death penalty being imposed on

juveniles spans all the way back to almost the beginning of

our country. In 1642, Thomas Graunger of Plymouth Colony,

Massachusetts, was the first juvenile, to be sentenced to

death and executed in our country for a crime that he

committed (Executions, 2000). Since the start of capital

punishment (or the recording thereof) in 1608, there has

been around 19,200 executions in the United States of all

ages. Of that total number, experts believe approximately

356 of them were juvenile executions, meaning that the crime

that the individual was sentenced for took place before the

offender was eighteen years of age (Gonnerman, 2000). This

accounts for about 1.8% of all executions from the start of

capital punishment to present (Executions, 2000). Since

1973 there has been 196 death sentences handed out to

juveniles and seventeen of those have ended in actual

execution (Streib, 2000). Table 1 lists those seventeen

individuals that have been executed since 1973, their date

and place of execution, their race, and their age both when

they committed their crime and when they were executed.

The juvenile justice system was born in 1899 at which

time it was recognized as separate from the regular justice

system that dealt with adult offenders (Ricotta, 1988). At

the start, the stated objectives of the juvenile justice

system was “…to provide measures of guidance and

rehabilitation for the child and protection for society, not

to fix criminal responsibility, guilt, and punishment”

(Ricotta, 1988). By the stated objectives it would seem as

though rehabilitation would be one of the most important

goals of the juvenile system. So how are we able to decide

now that a teenager is past the point of rehabilitation and

deserves the final punishment? Or does the obligation to

“protect society” become more overwhelming and leave us with

no other option but to put someone to death? These are just

a few questions that one might ask about our present goals

in comparison to the initial goals that were established

from the start. Next we will discuss the two pivotal court

cases that set the precedent for our current juvenile death

penalty statutes.

William Wayne Thompson, only fifteen years of age, and

three older persons were all found guilty of first degree

murder back in December of 1983. He was convicted of

murdering his brother-in-law in a most “heinous, atrocious,

and cruel” (Ricotta, 1988) way. After the district court

decided that their was “no reasonable prospects for

rehabilitation” (Ricotta, 1988) it was decided that he would

be tried as an adult. The Supreme Court of the United

States had to decide whether he could then be subject to

adult punishment which brought up the question of the eighth

amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause. The

Court justified the use of adult punishment by coining a

phrase that was used often in the written opinions by the

Justices. They stated that the discretion would be left up

to judges to determine the “evolving standards of decency

that mark the progress of a maturing society” (Ricotta,

1988) since they could not resolve what the writers of the

Constitution explicitly meant by cruel and unusual.

In this case, Thompson vs. Oklahoma (1988), the

Justices concluded that fifteen year olds were not prepared

to assume the responsibilities of an adult (Ricotta, 1988).

To this day no state allows the death penalty to be

appointed to any person under the age of sixteen. The next

year in Stanford vs. Kentucky (1989), the courts emphasized

the notion that the eighth amendment does not prohibit

juvenile execution for those age sixteen or seventeen (Beck,

1999). These cases are the key events in the development in

this issue. There are also International laws that speak of

this topic.

Steven Hawkins, director of the National Coalition to

abolish the Death Penalty, quotes in the article Dead Teen

Walking that “[w]e should be embarrassed to find ourselves

in [the] company” (Farley & Willwerth, 1998) of countries

such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, and Yemen.

These were the only countries outside the U.S. that still

used the death penalty for juveniles up until two years ago.

Currently, the U.S. is the only country in the world that

practices this punishment for juveniles (Streib, 2000). The

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

(Gonnerman, 2000) and the United Nations (UN) Convention on

the Rights of the Child (Amnesty, 1997) both outlaw the

death penalty for persons under the age of eighteen. The

U.S. ratified the former in 1992 and has yet to ratify the

latter. The UN Convention goes one step farther than this

discussion and also outlaws life imprisonment without parole

or juveniles (Amnesty, 1997). The U.S. definitely does not

look good when it comes to this subject when compared to

other countries, countries that are known for human rights

violations, and countries that decided to ratify the

International law.

So who are the “kids” that are committing these crimes

that force us to be in this debate in the first place?

Almost all the juveniles given the sentence of death are

male, 98% of the total (Streib 2000). Two-thirds of the

juveniles are minority offenders (Streib 2000), 20% being

Latino and the other 43% are African American (Gonnerman,

2000). One statistic of particular interest is that 80% of

the victims of these juveniles are adults (Streib 2000), not

kids their own age.

As of June 2000, their were seventy-four juveniles

under death sentence, the majority of which are in Texas.

Texas houses 26 of these young felons, one third of the

national total (Whitman, 2000), and has executed nine of the

seventeen that have been executed since 1973. Besides the

seventy-four sentenced to die currently and the 17 that have

been executed since 1973, there have been another 105

adolescents that have their sentences reversed (Streib

2000). On an even more individual note, a study was

conducted in 1988 of fourteen juvenile offenders.

Conclusions showed that all the individuals had serious

psychiatric problems, twelve had been abused as children,

and only two of the young people had IQ’s above ninety

(Farley & Willwerth, 1998). These similarities may help to

explain the reasons that some of the juveniles are awaiting

death, however this paper does not explore that issue.

The U.S. undoubtedly leads the world in juvenile

executions. Ten out of the nineteen juveniles to be

executed since 1990 have been in the U.S. (Gonnerman, 2000).

We average about ten death sentences per year according to

Victor Streib, the topics leading researcher (2000). There