Casper (WY) Star Tribune

February 19, 2004

Editorial

Wyoming’s House of Representative is now con­sid­er­ing House Bill 5, which pro­hibits the exe­cu­tion of juveniles.

This mea­sure deserves sup­port, for a num­ber of reasons.

The death penal­ty should be met­ed out only to the worst of the worst mem­bers of soci­ety, if it’s met­ed out at all. And juve­niles who are con­vict­ed of mur­ders com­mit­ted pri­or to their 18th birth­days rarely could be clas­si­fied as such. For those rare juve­niles who fit into that clas­si­fi­ca­tion, a sen­tence of life with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole is an option.

Currently, Wyoming is one of only 17 states that allow 16- and 17-year-olds to be executed.

Iran is the only oth­er coun­try that specif­i­cal­ly allows exe­cu­tions of juve­niles, and it has­n’t exe­cut­ed any juve­niles since 2001, accord­ing to Amnesty International. The most recent juve­nile exe­cu­tion in the United States was Scott Allen Hain, exe­cut­ed in Oklahoma on April 3, 2003, for a crime he com­mit­ted when he was 17.

There were 78 juve­nile offend­ers on death row in the U.S. as of April 2003.

Sixty-nine per­cent of U.S. adults oppose the death penal­ty for juve­niles, accord­ing to a 2002 Gallup poll, and the Supreme Court has ruled that exe­cut­ing per­sons who com­mit­ted their crimes while under age 16 is unconstitutional.

Child mur­der­ers may not have the capac­i­ty or oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn and under­stand ful­ly the con­se­quences of their crime. Consider this from an American Bar Association fact sheet: ​“Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis of New York University led com­pre­hen­sive diag­nos­tic eval­u­a­tions of 14 juve­niles on death row in four states. She found that nine had major neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­ders and sev­en had psy­chot­ic dis­or­ders since early childhood. …

“Other com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tics includ­ed suf­fer­ing trau­ma to the head and IQ scores under 90 (only two did bet­ter). Only three had aver­age read­ing abil­i­ties, and anoth­er three had learned to read on death row.”

Twelve of the 14 report­ed they had been abused phys­i­cal­ly and/​or sex­u­al­ly. In sev­er­al of the cas­es stud­ied, the accused with­held evi­dence of their his­to­ry and oth­er prob­lems fear­ing embar­rass­ment or because of poor coun­sel by their attorneys.

Wyoming has no juve­nile offend­ers on death row, and has not in mod­ern times exe­cut­ed any­one who com­mit­ted their crimes before they turned 18. Banning the prac­tice won’t change any­thing in the short term. In the long term, it affirms our own humanity.

Sources

Casper (WY) Star Tribune