Approximately 80 juvenile offenders are on death rows in the United States. Six of the past seven executed juvenile offenders have been from Texas and have been African American. Scott Hain, a white juvenile offender, was executed earlier this year by the state of Oklahoma.
Twenty-eight states now ban the execution of juvenile offenders – 16 states that permit the death penalty and 12 states that ban all executions. Hawkins argues that juvenile offender executions must be banned, just as the executions of people with mental retardation have been.
The Missouri Court found that executing juvenile offenders was cruel and unusual punishment and contrary to evolving standards of decency. It referred to the growing number of states that now ban such executions. The Missouri court opinion is available here. The court succinctly described its ruling this way:
....this Court finds that, in the fourteen years since Stanford was decided, a national consensus has developed against the execution of juvenile offenders, as demonstrated by the fact that eighteen states now bar such executions for juveniles, that twelve other states bar executions altogether, that no state has lowered its age of execution below 18 since Stanford, that five states have legislatively or by case law raised or established the minimum age at 18, and that the imposition of the juvenile death penalty has become truly unusual over the last decade.
Here is a chart showing each state's position on executing juvenile offenders.
The United States is one of very few countries in the world that permit the execution of juvenile offenders.
The death penalty for juvenile offenders has become a uniquely American practice, in that it has been abandoned legally by nations everywhere else due to the express provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and of several other international treaties and agreements.
The United Nations Convention (Article 37(a)) provides that "Neither capital punishment nor 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.
A very few rogue executions of juvenile offenders in 2 or 3 countries outside of the United States occurred in the1990's, despite the legal ban on this practice. These rogue executions are not seen in any way as a rejection either of the international agreements or of the customary international law (jus cogens) forbidding such executions. The last non-U.S. executions of juvenile offenders occurred in 2000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Iran in 2001, with none since this time. The last 5 executions of juvenile offenders (2001-2003) have occurred in the United States.
If Malvo is sentenced to death, this may be the case that the Supreme Court accepts to re-examine its earlier rulings and hopefully arrive at a more enlightened position. Executing those who are children at the time of the commission of their crime is deplorable and barbaric. It's time for the Supreme Court to conform its rulings to the evolving standards of decency in a civilized society and ban the practice.
