The death of a penalty

In a move that both surprised and pleased me,

[t]he U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday abolished the death penalty for juveniles, a major victory for opponents of capital punishment in the last country in the world that gave official sanction to the execution of people who commit crimes as minors[, Reuters reports].

By a 5-4 vote, the high court declared unconstitutional the death penalty those under the age of 18 when they committed their crimes, a decision that could affect more than 70 death row inmates who face execution for murders done when they were 16 or 17 years old.

The case arose after the Missouri Supreme Court declared the death sentence imposed on Christopher Simmons, who was 17 when he killed a woman, was unconstitutional and changed his sentence to life without parole. The Supreme Court today upheld that decision.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy accepted the arguments of capital punishment opponents that there had emerged both a national and an international consensus against juvenile executions, a consensus

"resting in large part on the understanding that the instability and emotional imbalance of young people may often be a factor in the crime," he wrote in the 25-page opinion.

That especially gratified me because it stepped away from the more tenuous arguments based on current notions of what is "proper" is dealing with crime (notions which can be and in the past have been stampeded with hyper-dramatized horror stories of particularly heinous acts) and toward facts: the steadily-growing body of scientific evidence showing that even in late adolescence, juveniles are more impulsive, more emotionally volatile, have less self-control, less ability to understand the perspective of others, and are less able to foresee the consequences of their actions than adults are. That is no slam on the young; it's a normal aspect of human development, one long since recognized colloquially (in pre-colonial times, men - meaning men, not "people" - were regarded as not fully mature until they were about 30) but now being demonstrated empirically.

Only recently, however, have studies yielded evidence of concrete differences that are anatomically based[, said an amicus brief filed by a group of eight medical, psychiatric, and social work associations lead by the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association].

Cutting-edge brain imaging technology reveals that regions of the adolescent brain do not reach a fully mature state until after the age of 18. These regions are precisely those associated with impulse control, regulation of emotions, risk assessment, and moral reasoning. Critical developmental changes in these regions occur only after late adolescence.

Another brief, filed by the American and Missouri Psychological Associations, echoed those arguments, adding, significantly, that

[d]elinquent, even criminal, behavior is characteristic of many adolescents, often peaking around age 18. ...

[But m]ost delinquent adolescents do not engage in violent illegal conduct through adulthood.

What's more, the brief noted,

Adolescents are "moving targets" for assessment of character and future dangerousness, two important considerations in the penalty phase of capital trials. ... Consequently, attempts to predict at capital sentencing an adolescent offender's character formation and dangerousness in adulthood are inherently prone to error and create an obvious risk of wrongful execution.

The transitory nature of adolescence also means that an adolescent defendant is much more likely to change in relevant respects between the time of the offense and the time of assessment by courts and experts. At sentencing, an offender may behave and look more like an adult than he or she did at the time the crime was committed.

All of which means is that even at the age of 16 or 17, children are not merely "small adults." Their brains are different from adult brains so they behave differently than adults do in ways that make it wrong for them to be held to the same legal standards. Happily, the Supreme Court - or at least a majority - recognized that fact.

The four dissenters - Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, and Thomas - would have been content to see the US remain the only country in the world that legally executes juveniles, just as it remains the only country in the world other than Somalia which has not ratified the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child. According to Amnesty International, since 1990 there have been 39 children executed. Nineteen of those executions, just about half, took place in the US. The others were in Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

That's the company the minority would have had us keep. Which I think tells us something about them.

Footnote: To see other amicus briefs filed on both sides, including one from 48 nations and another from 17 individual and group winners of a Nobel Peace Prize in opposition to juvenile executions, click here. A link to the text of the Supreme Court's decision is here.