Policy Issues
Juveniles
Offenders under the age of 18 are exempt from the death penalty. Developments in brain science have renewed debate about whether young adults should also be excluded.
Policy Issues
Offenders under the age of 18 are exempt from the death penalty. Developments in brain science have renewed debate about whether young adults should also be excluded.
Children are not as culpable as adults for their actions. In the death penalty context, that principle has caused debate about what age is too young for someone to be subject to execution. International human rights law has long prohibited the use of the death penalty against people who were younger than age 18 at the time of the offense. See Executions of Juveniles Outside of the U.S. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court brought the U.S. into compliance with that international norm, ruling that the U.S. Constitution also protects people from being sentenced to death for crimes committed when they were under 18. For more information, see the Roper v. Simmons Resource Page.
The Court had earlier (1987) held that the proper cutoff should be the age of 16, but states gradually applied more stringent standards to avoid conflict with other areas of the law where children were treated differently. By 2005, thirty states had either abolished the death penalty for all offenders or at least for those under the age of 18. As with its earlier ruling exempting defendants with intellectual disabilities, the Court found that a national consensus had formed around excluding those under 18, and that there was little to be gained in terms of deterrence or retribution by executing younger offenders. Some Justices pointed to the fact that the U.S. was virtually alone in the world in allowing juvenile offenders to be executed. The emerging science of brain development also contributed to this decision.
Debate has continued on whether even the age of 18 is too young to assume full adult accountability for a heinous crime. Some have suggested that 21 would be a more appropriate age both because of the rights and responsibilities conferred by society at that age and because new brain science shows that critical areas of the brain relating to judgment, thrill seeking, and consequential thinking do not mature until the mid-twenties. The Court’s ruling on the application of the death penalty to juveniles has spurred other decisions regarding the use of life-without-parole sentences for this same group.
DPIC has carefully monitored the flow of state legislation and court decisions regarding the appropriate age for the death penalty. The pertinent Supreme Court decision is fully analyzed. DPIC also makes available the thorough research by others on the use of the death penalty for juveniles in U.S. history, with statistics on sentences, executions, and the race of defendants.
Jun 23, 2020
Three professional organizations and eight practitioners in the fields of neuroscience and neuropsychology have joined a Texas death-row prisoner in challenging the constitutionality of the state’s use of “future dangerousness” findings to impose …
Read MoreJuveniles
Sep 05, 2023
Attorneys for Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, filed a motion on August 30 to re-open her appeals based on a recent decision from the Tenn…
Innocence
Aug 11, 2023
Gary Tyler was just 16 years old when he was charged with shooting a white student in 1974 and sentenced to death, a crime that, many witnesses agree, he did not commit. Mr. Tyler, then a sophomore in high school in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, …
Juveniles
Jun 13, 2023
In Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy, author Alex Mar presents an in-depth account of a violent homicide and its impact on a racially divided community and the individuals involved. Mar not only discusses the f…
Juveniles
Jun 06, 2023
Four jurors and two alternates from the 2010 trial of Michael Tisius have said in affidavits that they would support clemency in his case. Mr. Tisius is scheduled to be executed in Missouri on June 6, 2023. In his clemency petition, and in intervi…
Juveniles
Mar 23, 2023
In the latest episode of “Discussions with DPIC,” Robert Dunham, former Executive Director of DPIC, interviews Karen Steele (pictured), a researcher and defense attorney in Oregon, rega…
Juveniles
Feb 10, 2023
Professor Craig Haney (pictured) of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Professor Frank Baumgartner of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Karen Steele, a criminal defense attorney in Oregon, examined age and race data from …
Juveniles
Aug 29, 2022
Racial disparities in U.S. death sentences imposed on late adolescent offenders have grown substantially since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of capital punishment against juvenile offenders in 2005, according to a new report by
Juveniles
Aug 12, 2022
The American Psychological Association (APA) has overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for courts and legislators to ban the use of the death penalty against people charged with committing crimes while they were under age 21. Saying that “th…
Intellectual Disability
Mar 01, 2022
A new national poll has found that bipartisan majorities of Americans oppose seeking the death penalty against vulnerable groups of defendants who historically have been disproportionately subjected to its use. The poll, conducted by the …
Arbitrariness
Dec 17, 2021
At least one in seven death-row prisoners put to death in the United States since executions resumed in 1977 had legal claims in their cases that would render their executions unconstitutional, a new Cornell University Law School study shows. …