Executions barred for juvenile killers
In 5-4 ruling, justices invoke global standard
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court yesterday abolished the death penalty for juvenile killers, a practice that had put the United States in conflict with virtually the rest of the world.
A 5-to-4 majority held that society's ''evolving standard of decency" has reached a consensus that most minors are less blameworthy for their crimes than adults, so executing offenders who commited capital crimes before they were 18 is unconstitutionally ''cruel and unusual" punishment barred by the Eighth Amendment.
''The age of 18 is the point where society draws the line for many purposes between childhood and adulthood," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. ''It is, we conclude, the age at which the line for death eligibility ought to rest."
The court in 1988 barred the death penalty for offenders under 16, but declined the following year to strike down capital punishment for older juveniles or mentally retarded killers. Signaling a new willingness to chip away at the death penalty, the court in 2002 barred executing the mentally retarded. Yesterday, it extended the prohibition to older juveniles as well.
The decision struck down laws in 19 states, most in the South and West but including New Hampshire, that permitted the imposition of the death penalty on 16- and 17-year-olds. However, only three states in the past decade have carried out such sentences: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma, which executed the last 17-year-old offender, Scott Allen Hain, on April 3, 2003.
The court's ruling commuted a death sentence into life in prison for 72 juvenile killers around the country, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and ended Virginia prosecutors' plans to bring new charges against the nation's best-known juvenile murderer, Lee Boyd Malvo, in the hope of winning a decision to execute him.
Malvo has twice received life without parole for his involvement in 10 sniper killings that terrorized the Washington area in 2002, when he was 17. Prosecutors had planned a third prosecution against Malvo in another of the shooting deaths.
The ruling is also notable because the majority invoked foreign precedents in reaching its decision about what the US Constitution permits, a direction in legal reasoning sharply opposed by conservatives. Kennedy, the pivotal swing vote in the case, noted that since 1990, only seven other countries -- including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China -- have executed juvenile offenders, and all have since disavowed the practice.
Kennedy also noted that every nation except the United States and Somalia has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has a provision forbidding the juvenile death penalty. Somalia does not have a functioning government.
''It is fair to say that the United States now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile death penalty," Kennedy wrote, arguing that it was ''proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion" against the American stance.
Among parties filing briefs in favor of ending the juvenile death penalty were former US diplomats who said the practice damaged America's standing and moral authority in relations with other countries; 48 nations, including the European Union; Nobel Peace laureates, including Jimmy Carter; and the Bar of England and Wales.
In the 2002 case on mentally retarded killers and the new decision, the court majority held that its 1989 ruling to uphold executions of older juveniles had been correctly decided at the time.
The court said the meaning of what is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment has changed along with society. Since 1989, the court said, society reached a new consensus that mentally retarded and older juveniles were like the insane and younger children -- less culpable for their actions, and therefore entitled to protection from the ultimate punishment.
As in its 2002 decision, the court supported its claim that society's standard of decency has evolved, citing what states have done. Since 1989, all states that have changed their capital punishment laws for mentally retarded and older juveniles since 1989 have banned the death penalty in such cases.
For example, five states that allowed the juvenile death penalty at the time of the 1989 decision have since abandoned it -- four through legislative enactments and one through a court decision. No state that previously banned juvenile death penalties has restored it during that period, Kennedy noted.
The other four justices joining Kennedy in the majority -- Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, and John Paul Stevens -- had previously declared their opposition to the death penalty under any circumstances.
In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia ridiculed the notion that society's norms have changed so clearly since the 1989 decision. He argued that the narrow majority had usurped the power of legislatures to decide such complicated moral issues.
''The court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our nation's moral standards -- and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures," Scalia wrote. ''Because I do not believe that the meaning of our . . . Constitution should be determined by the subjective views of five members of this court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent."
Scalia was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. All of them are ''originalists" who believe that the meaning of the Constitution is fixed at what it meant when it was ratified in 1791.
Under that view, the Eighth Amendment cannot be interpreted as forbidding the juvenile death penalty because executing youths for heinous crimes was acceptable to society at the time of the founders.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who voted in 2002 to strike down the death penalty for mentally retarded killers but yesterday voted against striking it down for older juveniles, wrote a separate dissent. She recognized the relevance of foreign precedents and accepted the view that the Constitution evolves, but said she was not convinced that consensus has been reached in this issue.
''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," wrote O'Connor. ''Rather, I would demand a clearer showing that our society truly has set its face against this practice before reading the Eighth Amendment categorically to forbid it."
The decision involved the 1993 case of Christopher Simmons of Missouri. Simmons was 17 when he told two friends that he wanted to commit a murder and that he would ''get away with it" because he was a minor. He broke into the home of a neighbor, Shirley Crook, bound her with duct tape and wire, and threw her off a bridge into a river, where she drowned.
The state of Missouri tried Simmons as an adult, and he was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
But in 2003, nine years after Simmons's conviction, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned his sentence, holding that society's ''evolving standards of decency" meant that executing juvenile offenders was no longer acceptable.
The narrow majority of the US Supreme Court agreed. Citing both parental experience and brain research, Kennedy described ''marked" differences between juvenile and adult offenders, including minors' immaturity, susceptibility to influences such as peer pressure, and the fact that their character and personality are not yet well formed.
Because of those factors, Kennedy wrote, the two principal justifications for the death penalty -- retribution and deterrence -- are not met. Juvenile killers are less culpable for their actions, and so a lesser punishment is just retribution. And they are less able to make rational judgments, so the deterrence value of having a death penalty is diminished.
The death-row population in the United States is about 3,500. 