Baltimore Sun
July 27, 2004
International shame
THE SUPREME COURT has the chance this fall to step in and affirm that
teenage criminals ought not be sentenced to death, because they are not
old enough to be fully responsible for their judgment and their actions.
The juvenile death penalty, in place in 19 states and actively used in
seven, qualifies as “cruel and unusual punishment” under the
Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, according to a Missouri appellate court
ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court will review next session. And it
doesn’t deter crime or reflect the American ideal of treating children
differently from adults.
With this case, the court could put a stop to the practice, and it
should. Executing people for crimes they committed as 16- and
17-year-olds violates widely accepted human rights norms, as the
25-nation European Union and 23 other nations put it in a brief filed in
support of the Missouri case the court will consider next session. Such
policies isolate the United States from its allies and diminish the
power of its diplomats to speak out convincingly on the whole array of
human rights issues.
Child executions violate “minimum standards of decency now adopted by
nearly every other nation in the world, including even autocratic
regimes with poor human rights records,” reads a brief signed by retired
U.S. diplomats, including former Ambassadors Stuart E. Eizenstat,
Thomas R. Pickering and Felix G. Rohatyn. The only other countries that
killed convicts of mortal crimes committed in their youth in the past
four years were China, Congo, Iran and Pakistan, the diplomats say –
not America’s usual crowd. Maryland does not allow such executions;
Virginia does.
In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for
offenders younger than 16, but the next year upheld it for those 16 and
older, reflecting the fears that a generation of “superpredators” was
coming. It never did. And in 2002, the court banned executing mentally
retarded convicts, saying a “national consensus” considered such
executions wrong.
Research continues to confirm that the areas of the brain responsible
for impulse control and moral reasoning do not mature fully until age 18
(and sometimes into the mid-20s), the American Medical Association,
American Psychiatric Association and hundreds of other medical groups
and individuals repeated in a letter in support of abolition.
That matches the common wisdom hard-earned by parents, teachers and others in day-to-day contact with teenagers.
In a nation where 16- and 17-year-olds aren’t considered legally mature
enough to vote or buy beer, it strains credulity to argue that they
should have complete control over themselves in just this one, most
extreme, part of the law.
Compassion, coupled with scientific fact, argues for life.