Important Supreme Court Decision on the Death Penalty for Children

March 2005 

In a landmark decision announced on March 1, 2005, the US Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that state laws authorizing capital punishment for 16- and 17-year-olds, violate the Eighth Amendment and are henceforth unconstitutional. The action reverses the death sentences of 72 convicted murderers who committed their crimes as juveniles. The majority decision which acknowledged the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty was written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. It declared that prohibiting the execution of juvenile killers is a natural and logical conclusion to the court's 6-to-3 ruling in 2002 that executing mentally retarded offenders is categorically unconstitutional.

Justice Kennedy was joined in his opinion by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. The four dissenters were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O'Connor.

"Only seven countries other than the United States have executed juvenile offenders since 1990," Kennedy writes. "Since then each of these countries has either abolished capital punishment for juveniles or made public disavowal of the practice." Kennedy adds, "The opinion of the world community, while not controlling our outcome, does provide respected and significant confirmation for our own conclusions."

The European Union issued a statement applauding the ruling. So did former President Jimmy Carter, who said, "With this ruling, the United States acknowledges the national trend against juvenile capital punishment and joins the community of nations, which uniformly renounces this practice."