Kentucky Prosecutors Drop Death Penalty in Cases That Raised Constitutionality of Capital Punishment for Offenders Aged 18 – 21

Kentucky pros­e­cu­tors have dropped cap­i­tal charges against two defen­dants who had chal­lenged the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the death penal­ty for crimes com­mit­ted by offend­ers younger than 21 years old. On April 21, 2021, pros­e­cu­tors announced that they will no longer seek the death penal­ty against Efrain Diaz, Jr. and Justin Delone Smith, two of the three ado­les­cents accused of the 2015 killing University of Kentucky stu­dent Jonathan Krueger. A third co-defen­dant, Roman Gonzalez, is not eli­gi­ble for the death penal­ty because he was under 18 at the time of the crime.

Diaz and Smith were 20 and 18, respec­tive­ly, at the time of the crime. When Fayette County pros­e­cu­tors indi­cat­ed they would seek the death penal­ty, the defen­dants’ lawyers sought to bar its use against them because of their age. In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Thompson v. Oklahoma that impos­ing the death penal­ty on offend­ers who were younger than age 16 at the time of the offense con­sti­tut­ed cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. Sixteen years lat­er, in Roper v. Simmons, the Court extend­ed that pro­hi­bi­tion to indi­vid­u­als younger than age 18 at the time of the offense, point­ing to an evolv­ing nation­al con­sen­sus against exe­cut­ing juvenile offenders. 

Citing new neu­ro­science research that crit­i­cal por­tions of the late ado­les­cent brains of 18- to 21-year-olds func­tion much more like those of teenagers than adults, Fayette County Circuit Judge Ernesto Scorsone said it would be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al to apply the death penal­ty to an offend­er younger than age 21. He entered a sim­i­lar rul­ing in the case of 18-year-old offend­er Travis Bredhold. Prosecutors appealed his rul­ings to the Kentucky Supreme Court, which side­stepped the issue on March 26, 2020, hold­ing that the issue was not ripe to be decid­ed because none of the defen­dants had been con­vict­ed or sen­tenced to death.

The prosecution’s appeals of the tri­al court’s rul­ings pushed back the tri­al for Diaz and Smith by near­ly three years, con­clud­ing just as the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic was shut­ting down courts across the coun­try. Now, because of the con­tin­u­ing effects of the pan­dem­ic, the tri­al has been delayed an addi­tion­al year to April 4, 2022, less than two weeks before the sev­enth anniver­sary of Krueger’s death.

The Kentucky Kernel, the University of Kentucky stu­dent news­pa­per where Krueger worked as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, inter­viewed Krueger’s moth­er about her expe­ri­ences in the six years since her son died. ​“I nev­er dreamed that six years lat­er we’d still be wait­ing for all this to have a res­o­lu­tion,” said Mary Krueger, Jonathan’s moth­er. ​“I’m frankly stunned that it’s tak­en this long, but I kind of real­ized as time marched on these cas­es take on a life of their own, and they’re sort of out of our hands. … I have the sense that when it’s all done it’s still going to be frus­trat­ing, just because of what hap­pened, how sense­less the whole thing was.”

Friends remem­bered Krueger as fun-lov­ing, friend­ly, and kind. They recount­ed how he wel­comed new­com­ers and went out of his way to cheer up friends or fix a cri­sis. His moth­er told the Kernel that she tries to live life to the fullest to hon­or Jonathan’s mem­o­ry, but she also spoke of how the pend­ing tri­al casts a shad­ow on her family’s efforts to heal. ​“The tri­al part of it, I know that impacts the lives of three oth­er peo­ple and their fam­i­lies. But it just is kind of out there as some­thing that’s part of our lives, but it’s all the oth­er things that I think we wrap our­selves around in the way of mem­o­ries and try­ing to live or prac­tice what he did more so than focus­ing on the out­come of that, because it’ll nev­er give us what we want back,” she said.