On March 1^st, 2005, the US Supreme Court issued a hugely important decision. In the case of Roper v. Simmons, the court ruled 5 to 4 that state laws allowing capital punishment for people who committed crimes as sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds were unconstitutional and that all such executions must stop. This ruling voided the death sentences of about seventy convicted murderers across the U.S. who had committed capital crimes before their eighteenth birthdays (Yen). In the decision, Justice Kennedy wrote that the court’s ruling was based on international standards of justice and on the precedent set by the case of Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, which said that mentally retarded defendants could not be given the death penalty. Despite this ruling, the controversy over the death penalty for juveniles still continues.

According to Cothern, those who favor allowing the death penalty for crimes committed by people under eighteen cite increasing rates of serious crimes committed by young people, as well as the increasingly violent nature of those crimes (1). They say that the death penalty is useful in three ways: as “a deterrent against similar crimes, an appropriate sanction for the commission of certain serious crimes, and a way to main- tain public safety” (2).

Even though no studies have supported the deterrent effect of the death penalty, this argument remains a strong one, from an emotional point of view. If the deterrent effect does exist, then putting murderers to death saves innocent lives by preventing other people from committing murder. If the effect does not exist, the only loss is of lives that would have been lived out in prison anyway and whose value was reduced by the horrible crimes they committed.

The second argument for the death penalty for juveniles is that some crimes are so horrible that they demand the death penalty no matter how old the criminal was at the time. In the case the Supreme Court heard, Roper v. Simmons, the defendant, Christopher Simmons, was only seventeen when he kidnapped his neighbor, hog tied her, and threw her to her death from a bridge into a stream. Even though he was only a junior in high school, he planned the crime with his friends and afterward bragged about it, claiming he would get away with it because he was not eighteen (Roper v. Simmons 2-4). Simmons lack of remorse for his actions and the cold-blooded way he planned the crime seem even worse in a person who is so young. If he could do this as a child, what worse things would he be able to do when he is an adult?

The final argument, that executing juveniles maintains public safety is harder to argue. Since the crimes that people can get the death penalty for are so bad, it would be likely the criminals would spend the rest of their lives in prison if they were not executed. Although there might be a small risk of them escaping someday, it is unlikely enough not to be a serious threat to public safety.