Juvenile Death Penalty

History

The earliest recorded juvenile execution occurred in the Plymouth Colony, Massachusettes, in 1642, when a young man by the name of Thomas Graunger was executed by hanging for having sex with animals. George Stinney was the youngest juvenile offender executed in the United States in the past hundred years. In 1944, he was put to death at the age of 14 for the murder of two South Carolina girls. In more recent times, since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty, 21 juveniles have been put to death, and some 80 currently await execution.

Statistics with Regard to State, Race, and Gender

As the remainder of the world moves toward abolishing the death penalty for juveniles, the United States has maintained its commitment to this practice in 22 of its 50 states. Within these states, certain patterns arise. For example, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming all sentence juveniles to death for crimes committed when the defendant was as young as 16. In contrast, in Florida, Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Texas, offenders must be at least 17 years old to receive a [Page 507]death sentence. Finally, as with adults, Texas has been responsible for more juvenile executions than any other state, putting to death 13 of the 21 juvenile offenders executed in the United States since 1976. Also like adults, the death penalty tends to be disproportionately applied to young men of color. Thus, two-thirds of the 80 young people currently awaiting execution belong to racial or ethnic minorities. Of the 13 young people put to death in Texas, 9 have been either African American or Latino and all have been male.

U.S. Agreements with the International Community

The international community has agreed on many basic human rights principles. One of these, the Fourth Geneva Convention, signed in 1949, Article 68, pertains to the execution of juvenile offenders. Here it states, “In any case the death penalty may not be pronounced against a protected person who was under eighteen years of age at the time of the offense.” In 1970, a second declaration was signed confirming a person's basic right to life. Likewise, the American Convention on Human Rights, Article 4(5) affirms, “Capital punishment shall not be imposed upon persons who, at the time the crime was committed, were under eighteen years of age.”

In 1992, the United States ratified Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) agreeing to prohibit the use of the death penalty for those under the age of 18. Soon afterward, however, the United States expressed reservations with this arrangement. Three years later, the United States refused to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 37 [a]), 1995, which reconfirmed the ICCPR's covenant, maintaining that capital punishment shall not be imposed on any person committing an offense below 18 years of age. Only Somalia also refused to agree to this contract.

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