NCJ Number
180567
Date Published
October 1998
Length
37 pages
Annotation
This analysis of juvenile capital punishment notes that more than half the world's countries have abolished capital punishment, that most retentionist countries execute only adults, and that the United States now heads a tiny circle of countries that perpetrates the human rights violation of executing people for crimes committed as children.
Abstract
The Federal Government has explicitly reserved the right to defy international bans as expressed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. As a result, some 70 juvenile offenders are currently on death row, and 8 such prisoners have been executed in the United States in the 1990's. The overwhelming and nearly global consensus against juvenile capital punishment does not try to excuse violent juvenile crime or belittle the suffering of victims and families. Instead, it recognizes that children are not yet fully mature and have greater possibilities for rehabilitation than do adults. The Federal Government has set 18 as the minimum age of eligibility for Federal death row, but this action does not absolve it from its responsibility to ensure that State governments do the same. The United States Supreme Court has upheld executions of offenders who were 16 or 17 at the time of their crimes; however, it was wrong to rely on State laws and jury practices and to ignore universal standards of decency contained in international instruments. Human rights have no borders. Therefore, the Federal Government should take steps to ensure that States comply with international standards; States should establish a moratorium on the execution of juvenile offenders pending the enactment of legislation ending juvenile capital punishment. Case examples, photographs, tables, and notes