Juvenile Death Penalty Axed

US News Article | Reuters.com

I believe the death penalty, in general, is an option that may be exercised when it matches the crime. Indeed, sometimes there are criminals who probably deserve a lot worse than mere death by lethal injection. And if someone happens to be less than 18 years old, the judge or jury should still be able to have the option of having a deserving person permanently removed. In this particular case, linked below, I believe the jury probably did have sufficient basis for imposing the death on the guy because it was deliberate, depraved, and one would be hard pressed to find a redeeming value in someone who expresses a desire to commit a homocide, go through with it, and then brag about it.

But that doesn't matter. What does matter to the Court, however, is America's evolving standard of decency as demonstrated by a plurality of the death penalty states exempting juveniles from the death penalty, diminished culpability since people with fewer than 18 years of life probably haven't done a cost-benefit analysis of a crime to its consequences, and a juvenile's susceptibility to surrounding influences/peer pressure/bad home.

I'll go along with the evolving decency argument, but keep the "bad home" excuse away. There are plenty of people who come from a bad home environment that don't kill people for the fun of it. You might as well say that juveniles are mentally retarded/incapacitated and therefore there's precedent/law to not sentence such people to death. Yeah, I think I'd rather go with that than the bad home environment excuse.

The prior case regarding juvenile death penalty that went before this case was Stanford. The Court said in that particular case that Stanford (the juvenile) could go ahead and be executed even though he was a juvenile at the time. Interestingly, Stanford was not put to death, but instead the governor of the state, Ketucky I think, commuted the death sentence and gave him life without parole. In fact, only 3 states in the last ten years have put a juvenile to death.

So, it looks like this isn't really so shocking after all. If anything, this is simply putting the ink on the paper that juveniles aren't to receive the death penalty and showing that America has become more decent since 1989, at least on this issue.

Background of the case.
And here's the opinion.