Executions of Juveniles in the U.S. 1976-2005

In 1642, the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts exe­cut­ed Thomas Graunger, mak­ing him the first juve­nile offend­er put to death in the American colonies. Between then and the March 1, 2005 U.S. Supreme Court deci­sion in Roper v. Simmons that end­ed juve­nile exe­cu­tions in the U.S., 365 peo­ple con­firmed to have been juve­niles at the time of their offense were exe­cut­ed. That total con­sti­tutes 1.8% of the rough­ly 20,000 con­firmed American exe­cu­tions since colonial times. 

Twenty-two juve­nile offend­ers were exe­cut­ed in the United States in the three decades between the Supreme Court deci­sions uphold­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in 1976 and the exe­cu­tion bar announced in Roper (see map, below). Those 22 exe­cu­tions com­prised about 2% of the exe­cu­tions car­ried out in that time peri­od. All but one occurred in the South and all were in the states that com­prised the former confederacy.