Supreme Court Strikes Down Death Penalty for Juveniles | WSJ | 3.1.05
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Constitution forbids the execution of killers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes, ending a practice used in 19 states.
The 5-4 decision throws out the death sentences of about 70 juvenile murderers and bars states from seeking to execute minors for future crimes. …
Supreme Court Strikes Down Death Penalty for Juveniles | WP | 3.1.05
The Supreme Court, in a landmark death penalty decision, today barred executions of people under 18 years of age at the time of their crimes.
By vote of 5-to-4, the court said in a case from Missouri that there is now a “consensus” in American society that juveniles, along with the mentally retarded, are “less culpable” for their crimes because they lack sound judgment.
Execution is therefore a “disproportionate” sanction that violates the 8th Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, the court ruled,…
Roper v. Simmons | 3.1.05
SCOTUS slip opinion (PDF)
Oyez
Holding: The Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments forbid imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed.
The Court’s decision today establishes a categorical rule forbidding the execution of any offender for any crime committed before his 18th birthday, no matter how deliberate, wanton, or cruel the offense. Neither the objective evidence of contemporary societal values, nor the Court’s moral proportionality analysis, nor the two in tandem suffice to justify this ruling.
… I would not substitute our judgment about the moral propriety of capital punishment for 17-year-old murderers for the judgments of the Nation’s legislatures. …
…However sound philosophically, this is no way to run a legal system. We must disregard the new reality that, to the extent our Eighth Amendment decisions constitute something more than a show of hands on the current Justices’ current personal views about penology, they purport to be nothing more than a snapshot of American public opinion at a particular point in time (with the timeframes now shortened to a mere 15 years). We must treat these decisions just as though they represented real law, real prescriptions democratically adopted by the American people, as conclusively (rather than sequentially) construed by this Court. Allowing lower courts to reinterpret the Eighth Amendment whenever they decide enough time has passed for a new snapshot leaves this Court’s decisions without any force–especially since the “evolution” of our Eighth Amendment is no longer determined by objective criteria. To allow lower courts to behave as we do, “updating” the Eighth Amendment as needed, destroys stability and makes our case law an unreliable basis for the designing of laws by citizens and their representatives, and for action by public officials. The result will be to crown arbitrariness with chaos.
Stanford v. Kentucky (Oyez) | 6.26.89
Scalia for the majority:
In a 5-to-4 decision the Court held that in weighing whether the imposition of capital punishments on offenders below the age of eighteen is cruel and unusual, it is necessary to look at the given society’s evolving decency standards. With respect to American society, there is no national consensus regarding the imposition of capital punishments on 17- or 16-year-old individuals. Of the 37 states which permit capital punishment, 12 prohibit the death penalty for offenders below the age of 17 while 15 states prohibit capital punishment for 16 year olds. Moreover, discrepancies in national opinion polls, interest group views, and professional association studies, all indicate a lack of unanimity concerning the acceptability of death sentences for such relatively young offenders. Thus, the decision whether to subject 17 or 16 year olds to capital punishment must be made locally by the states and cannot be categorically pronounced as cruel and unusual punishment at this time.
I’m as equally perplexed over what happens between the 17th year and 365th day and the 18th year, in terms of age, as I am between the 19 th and 6/7th week and the 20th week, in terms of gestation. But I believe in both instances, Scalia is correct, arbitrariness has a coronation…