The Washington Post recently responded to Judge Jane Marum Roush’s decision allowing Virginia to seek the death penalty for Lee Boyd Malvo despite treaties forbidding such a sentence for juveniles. The paper’s editorial noted that while the judge’s decision may be legally correct, it “does not render Virginia’s (juvenile death penalty) policy any less abhorrent.” The editorial went on to state:
Virginia’s juvenile death penalty should not be abolished by a judge because the French object to it. But we hope that someday soon it will be abolished by the General Assembly because Virginians object to it — and in that regard, international opinion is one factor worthy of consideration… .[W]hatever one thinks of capital punishment, it ought not be applied to children, whose personalities and capacities for judgment are not yet fully formed. Government takes on, in general, a protective role with respect to children — one that sometimes restricts their liberty and the liberty of adults in dealing with them, by way of keeping them safe. It is an abdication of that protective role for state governments, even in prosecuting terrible crimes, to respond to youth crime by seeking execution. To sentence someone to die for a crime committed as a child, one has to believe that — in the long natural life the defendant would otherwise have before him — meaningful change and some measure of redemption are either impossible or unimportant.
(Washington Post, September 19, 2003). See Juvenile Death Penalty.