What is your opinion on the death penalty to persons under 18?

Question

5 nations authorize the death penalty for people who committed their crimes while under 18 in the United States since 2005 the death penalty and allowed only for +18 years

Answer 1

Death Penalty Under 18

Answer 2

I am against it.



I see two major arguments made for the death penalty: Revenge and deterrence. I’ll address each one separately and then add some additional points below.



Revenge:

The criminal justice system is supposed to be about justice, not revenge. If we execute a criminal out of revenge, we are no better than the criminal. As part of this, people often say that it will give the families of the victim relief or closure. I have seen nothing that leads me to believe this is the case. Conversely, I have seen in many instances where the families expressed remorse and sadness due to the execution.



Deterrence:

The fact is, the death penalty does not work as deterrence to crime. The Death Penalty Information Center fact sheet located at http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/FactSheet.pdf states in part:



· “According to a survey of the former and present presidents of the country's top academic criminological societies, 84% of these experts rejected the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. (Radelet & Akers, 1996)”



· “Consistent with previous years, the 2004 FBI Uniform Crime Report showed that the South had the highest murder rate. The South accounts for over 80% of executions. The Northeast, which has less than 1% of all executions, again had the lowest murder rate.”



Other Issues:

Permanence – The death penalty once applied is permanent. This would not be a big deal I suppose if we could guarantee that an innocent person never would be executed. However this is just not the case. If you spend any time on the web site http://www.innocenceproject.org/ you will see 205 people that were cleared because of DNA evidence. These people spent sometimes 20 years in jail, many on death row for a crime that it was later proved they did not commit. I have always believed “better that a guilt man goes free than to imprison or execute an innocent man”. Some people fervently disagree with that statement. I expect the story would change if they were the innocent one.



Costs – Many people believe that executing criminals is less expensive than keeping them in prison for life. Again this is simply not the case. There are two factors that drive up the cost of death penalty cases, the mandatory and automatic appeal process that is built in to ensure the death penalty is fair and appropriate in the case and the additional cost of maintaining a “death row”. The Death Penalty Information Center fact sheet states in part:



· “The California death penalty system costs taxpayers $114 million per year beyond the costs of keeping convicts locked up for life.”



· “In Texas, a death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million, about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. (Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1992).”



Racism – There is an imbalance in how and when the death penalty is sought. Additionally, it appears to me that the death penalty is used in a disproportionate number of cases involving minorities particularly blacks. The Death Penalty Information Center fact sheet contains a great analysis of race and the death penalty.



In conclusion, I feel it is time to end the death penalty as I believe it does not serve the interest of justice.

Answer 3

I'm against it. I agree with the US Supreme Court when in ruled (March, 2005) I that the death penalty for those who had committed their crimes at under 18 years of age was cruel and unusual punishment and hence barred by the Constitution.



Part of the majority decision: "When a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the State can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the State cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity."



The Court reaffirmed the necessity of referring to “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” to determine which punishments are so disproportionate as to be cruel and unusual. The Court reasoned that the rejection of the juvenile death penalty in the majority of states, the infrequent use of the punishment even where it remains on the books, and the consistent trend toward abolition of the juvenile death penalty demonstrated a national consensus against the practice. The Court determined that today our society views juveniles as categorically less culpable than the average criminal.

Answer 4

I am not against capital punishment all together, however there are surely much better ways to deal with an under-18 than execution.



Rehabilitation should be the first port of call with an under-18, establishing what caused them to commit this crime, and ways that we can help them become a better person.

Answer 5

It alwasy depends upon the exact circumstances and all are different.



Why Some “Juvenile” Murderers Should Qualify For The Death Penalty:

Brain Science and Other Issues

Dudley Sharp, 10/2/04



There are a number of inadequate issues raised in opposition to 16-17 year old murderers being culpable for the death penalty — Brain science and other argumentsare either weak or false.



BRAIN SCIENCE & JUVENILE DEATH PENALTY — NO HOLY GRAIL (1)



“The brain data don’t show that adolescents typically have reduced legal culpability for crimes.” Harvard University psychologist Jerome Kagan.



UCLA’s Elizabeth Sowell, another prominent brain-development researcher, takes a dim view of the movement to apply neuroscience to the law. She says that no current research connects specific brain traits of typical teenagers to any mental or behavioral problems.



“The scientific data aren’t ready to be used by the judicial system,” she remarks. “The hardest thing [for neuroscientists to do] is to bring brain research into real-life contexts.”



The ambiguities of science don’t mix with social and political causes, contends neuroscientist Bradley S. Peterson of the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. For instance, it’s impossible to say at what age teenagers become biologically mature because the brain continues to develop in crucial ways well into adulthood, he argues.



Such findings underscore the lack of any sharp transition in brain development that signals maturity, according to neuroscientist William T. Greenough of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Definitions of adulthood change depending on social circumstances, Greenough points out. Only 200 years ago, Western societies regarded 16-year-olds as adults.



“Brain science offers no simple take-home message about adolescents,” says B.J. Casey of Cornell University’s Weill Medical College in New York City. “It’s amazing how little we know about the developing brain.”



Brain-scanning techniques, including the popular MRI, remain a “crude level of analysis,” Casey notes. What’s more, many critical brain-cell responses are too fast for MRI to track.



Brain data, particularly those on delayed frontal-lobe growth in adolescents, also need to be put in a cultural and historical perspective, Harvard’s Kagan asserts. Frontal-lobe development presumably proceeds at roughly the same pace in teenagers everywhere. Yet current rates of teen violence and murder vary from remarkably low to alarmingly high from country to country, he notes.



“Something about cultural context must be critical here,” Kagan says. “Under the right conditions, 15-year-olds can control their impulses without having fully developed frontal lobes.”



If incomplete brains automatically reduce adolescents’ capacity to restrain their darker urges, “we should be having Columbine incidents every week,” he adds.



Science News summarizes these positions: ” . . .brain science doesn’t belong in court because there’s no evidence linking specific characteristics of teens’ brains to any legally relevant condition, such as impaired moral judgment or an inability to control murderous impulses. ”



AGE, ALONE, CANNOT DICTATE CULPABILITY



No one, including psychiatrists, psychologists and brain specialists, disputes that some 16-17 year olds are as mature, or more mature, than some of those 18 and older. US Supreme Court Justices, Nobel Peace Prize winners, the American Medical Association and the European Union agree.



Therefore, the argument against executing some 16-17 year old murderers is without merit, when it is based upon age, alone.



Is a murderer less culpable solely because they murdered someone one-second, one minute, one week, one month or one year before their 18th birthday? Of course not.



US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor writes:



“Furthermore, granting the premise that adolescents are generally less blameworthy than adults who commit similar crimes, it does not necessarily follow that all 15-year-olds are incapable of the moral culpability that would justify the imposition of capital punishment. Nor is there evidence that 15-year-olds as a class are inherently incapable of being deterred from major crimes by the prospect of the death penalty.” (2)



It is argued that because people have to be older to drink, vote, marry, etc., that it is hypocritical to say that some 16-17 year olds are mature enough to be death eligible for committing capital murder.



If society so wished we could individually evaluate 16-17 years olds (just as we do within the criminal justice system) to determine which of those were as mature as 18-21 year olds and allow those to participate in those responsibilities and privileges. No one doubts that many would qualify. Furthermore, there is a major difference between a social privilege and culpability for capital murder.



MacArthur Juvenile Competence Study: “The study did not find differences between juveniles aged 16 and 17 and young adults (18-24) in abilities relevant to their competence to stand trial.” (3)



HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION



Those who claim that the death penalty is a human rights violation have failed to make their case.



It is presented that some US states are equal with a number of less democratic nations that execute those who were under age 18 when they committed their murder(s).



First, the US criminal justice system is quite different from those nations. Second, as no one disputes that many 16-17 year olds are as mature as some 18-21 year olds, this argument means nothing.



In terms of proportionality, execution cannot be viewed as disproportionately severe in relation to the crime. The innocent murder victim did not earn or deserve their fate, whereas the murderer voluntarily took the lives of the innocent and thereby volunteered for the punishment available within that jurisdiction.



(1) excerpts from “Teen Brains on Trial”, Bruce Bower, Science News, 5/8/04, vol. 165, No. 19, p.299

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040508/bob9.asp



(2) Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815 (1988) (USSC) at

www2.law.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/foliocgi.exe/historic/query=[group+487+u!2Es!2E+815!3A]!28[group+edited!3A]!7C[level++case+citation!3A]!29/doc/{@1}/hit_headings/words=4/hits_only?



(3) from Study Summary, ” MacArthur Juvenile Competence Study”,www.mac-adoldev-juvjustice.org/competence%20study%20summary.pdf

Full Study, Results, http://www.mac-adoldev-juvjustice.org/page23.html





NOTE: the study was partially funded by the Open Society Institute, one of the Soros Foundations, a product of George Soros, who may be he largest financier of anti death penalty efforts, worldwide.



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Kennedy, child rape & the Supremes

Dudley Sharp



In Kennedy v Louisiana, SCOTUS makes this blunder: “the court rested its condemnation of executing the rapists of children largely on what it described as a trend away from the use of death to punish such crimes both here and abroad.”



Just the opposite is true.



The state laws imposing the death penalty option on child rape cases were relatively new and a number of states were actively considering passing such laws in their states, as well.



In other words, we were seeing a new trend to pass such laws, instead of a trend away from them.



By outlawing such new laws, it was SCOTUS that was, wrongly and intentionally, stopping a new trend. This is a horrible precedent – to use SCOTUS-speak, SCOTUS was, knowingly, stopping new laws which may become the evolving standard and, quite possibly, preventing anational consensus towards having the death penalty for child rapists.



Is the newest “constitutional” guide for SCOTUS preemptive trend stopping? Maybe.



SCOTUS’ evolving standards doctrine and the national consensus “standards” are both prone to this type of constitutional perversion – the alchemy of highly strained legal arguments derived from personal opinion.



In fact, the national consensus was for the death penalty for child rape cases.



See Jim Lindgren’s, A National Consensusî in Favor of the Death Penalty for Child Rapists”

http://volokh.com/posts/1214447764.shtml



And a July, 2008 National Poll



By a 55 – 38 percent margin, voters favor the death penalty for a person convicted of raping a child. Women and men are consistent in their support. http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1295.xml?ReleaseID=1194



Another excellent example of this type of phony consensus and evolving standards doctrine improperly used by SCOTUS†is this,



A phony ‘consensus’ on youthful killers

by Jeff Jacoby in a Boston Globe op/ed

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/03/06/a_phony_consensus_on_youthful_killers/



As a firm adherent to the reality that incentives matter to most people, including criminals, I was concerned that if the sanction options were equal for child rape and child murder that some rapists would be more prone to murder their victims. Therefore, I was not a proponent of the death penalty for child rape.