WASHINGTON (ABP) — The Supreme Court ruled March 1 that the execution of convicts who were under the age of 18 at the time of their crimes constitutes the sort of “cruel and unusual” punishment barred by the Eighth Amendment.
The high court's decision overturns one of its own cases from less than 16 years ago and means that several dozen 16- and 17-year-old offenders currently on the nation's death rows will receive a new lease on life.
The 5-4 decision turned on the idea that, since the court last ruled on this issue in 1989, “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” have changed in regard to executing juveniles.
“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,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the court's majority opinion. “The age of 18 is the point where society draws the line for many purposes between childhood and adulthood. It is, we conclude, the age at which the line for death eligibility ought to rest.”
The case — Roper vs. Simmons (03-633) — originated in Missouri. In 1993, Christopher Simmons abducted Shirley Crook from her St. Louis-area home, bound her hands and feet, and threw her from a bridge into the Meramec River. A coroner's investigation determined that Crook was alive when she hit the water and that she died of drowning.
Simmons was a 17-year-old junior in high school at the time he committed the crime. He was arrested after bragging to peers about the murder. A jury awarded him the death sentence.
But in a highly unusual move, a divided Missouri Supreme Court in 2003 overruled Simmons' sentence, citing cited a then-recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that barred the execution of mentally disabled criminals.
In that 2002 decision (Atkins vs. Virginia) the justices noted a large number of states had outlawed execution of the mentally retarded since they last ruled on the issue in 1989. The March 1 decision applies similar reasoning to the case of teenage offenders.
A 1988 decision by the justices already outlawed capital punishment for offenders under the age of 16. But the next year, the court upheld capital sentences for 16- and 17-year-olds. Kennedy joined the majority in that ruling but changed his opinion for the latest ruling due to the increasing number of states outlawing capital punishment for all minors.
While 19 states still officially permitted the death penalty for minors prior to the March 1 decision, the practice has become exceedingly rare in recent years — with only Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma actually executing 16- or 17-year-old offenders in the past decade. Several other states have outlawed the practice since 1989.
But in a dissenting opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor — who voted with the majority in the decision on mentally disabled criminals — said the cases are not parallel.
“I would demand a clearer showing that our society truly has set its face against this practice before reading the Eighth Amendment categorically to forbid it,” she wrote. “[T]he evidence before us fails to demonstrate conclusively that any such consensus has emerged in the brief period since we upheld the constitutionality of this practice in Stanford v. Kentucky.”
A much smaller number of states have outlawed capital punishment for juvenile offenders since the court's last ruling on the subject when compared to the number of states that outlawed the death penalty for retarded offenders between 1989 and 2002, O'Connor noted.
She also said there was a significant difference between the mentally disabled as a category and juvenile offenders. “Adolescents as a class are undoubtedly less mature, and therefore less culpable for their misconduct, than adults,” O'Connor wrote. “But the court has adduced no evidence impeaching the seemingly reasonable conclusion reached by many state legislatures: that at least some 17-year-old murderers are sufficiently mature to deserve the death penalty in an appropriate case.”
She said the crime at issue in this case may fit that bill. “Christopher Simmons' murder of Shirley Crook was premeditated, wanton, and cruel in the extreme,” O'Connor wrote. “One can scarcely imagine the terror that this woman must have suffered throughout the ordeal leading to her death. Whatever can be said about the comparative moral culpability of 17-year-olds as a general matter, Simmons' actions unquestionably reflect” a conscience even more depraved than that of most murderers.
In a separate dissenting opinion, the court's three most conservative justices — Chief Justice William Rehnquist and associate justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — took Kennedy to task for appealing to international practices in his opinion.
Authoring the dissent, Scalia said the majority's opinion makes a “mockery” of the founding fathers' understanding of the Constitution and the judiciary's role in interpreting it. “The court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our nation's moral standards — and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures,” he wrote.
Scalia continued: “Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eighth Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five members of this court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent.”
But Kennedy, in noting that “the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty,” also said that reasoning did not control the majority's decision but merely “provides respected and significant confirmation” of the majority's decision.
“It does not lessen our fidelity to the Constitution or our pride in its origins to acknowledge that the express affirmation of certain fundamental rights by other nations and peoples simply underscores the centrality of those same rights within our own heritage of freedom,” Kennedy concluded.