Death denied

THE SUPREME Court's decision yesterday declaring the execution of juveniles unconstitutional is a ringing example of the ''evolving standards of decency" that the court has applied to other death penalty cases. We hope the court's thinking will continue to evolve until the stain of capital punishment is eradicated from the nation's laws.

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By a vote of 5-4, the court ruled that putting to death defendants who were minors at the time of their crimes violates the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy found mounting evidence -- including legislative action in the states -- of an emerging national consensus that ''the death penalty is a disproportionate penalty for juveniles."

The court applied the same logic in 2002 when it declared the death penalty unconstitutional for mentally retarded defendants. Increasingly, state legislatures had been passing laws prohibiting execution of mentally impaired individuals, who lawmakers found could not fully understand the deterrent intent of capital punishment laws.

Yesterday's decision -- Roper v. Simmons -- involved the Missouri case of Christopher Simmons, who was 17 when he kidnapped a neighbor and threw her off a bridge to her death. The decision gave careful attention to trends against juvenile execution. The federal government does not execute minors, and neither do 31 states, including 19 of the 38 that have a death penalty. This disproves Antonin Scalia's dissenting complaint that ''the court proclaims itself the sole arbiter of our nation's moral standards."

This page opposes capital punishment in all cases, but the practice has been especially difficult to justify for juvenile defendants. Society declares that minors are not mature enough to vote, drink, marry without a parent's permission, or serve on a jury, but somehow they have been responsible enough to be subject to the country's most extreme sanction. Yesterday's decision is a victory for logic as well as justice.

The decision will reverse the death sentence for Simmons and 71 other juveniles on death row. Also yesterday, Virginia prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty for Lee Malvo, the D.C.-area sniper who is already serving a life term for the murderous rampage he embarked on in 2002 under the sway of an adult, John Muhammad.

Capital executions are far from fail-safe, do not deter crime, are applied arbitarily from state to state, discriminate against the poor, and brutalize society by accepting retributive violence. A life sentence without the possibility of parole is the appropriate sanction for heinous crimes in a decent society.