Juvenile Death Penalty
Amanda Pflugh
My DBQ topic is The Juvenile Death Penalty. I took a lot of time and
researched a lot of information about the juvenile death penalty. I have found facts,
pictures, learned different laws in different areas for the case, got many different
opinions about the juvenile death penalty, and have viewed some real stories as
well. First, my opinion about the juvenile death penalty is I don’t believe that the
penalty of juveniles is acceptable if a juvenile does something that isn’t smart and
unacceptable. The reason for my belief is because I don’t think that such young
people should receive a death penalty because those people are really young and
they can just be put in jail or another punishment that the government can come up
with. This would maybe give the chance for those young juveniles who commit a
crime to learn a lesson and make them realize what they have done. In March,
during the year of 2005, the Supreme Court has decided that the execution of
victims, who have committed their crimes before the age of 18, was
unconstitutional. Many court cases go over and wonder if they should consider the
juvenile death penalty as the Eighth Amendment, which is cruel and unusual
punishment. An appropriate punishment for some heinous crimes, regardless of
how old the offender is. I have viewed other people’s opinions about the juvenile
death penalty and I have researched that some people thought that the juvenile
death penalty is not acceptable because they are only so young and their brain isn’t
developed enough so they don’t know any better. Some people think it is necessary
to only give a death penalty if you are a murder. Similar cases that relate to a case of
a juvenile death penalty would be the Roper v. Simmons case, the eighth
amendment, and the evolving standards of decency Stanford v. Kentucky. In the
United States, the Juvenile’s definition of their ages varies differently from state to
state. The system applies to anyone who is between the ages typically 6-10,
depending on the state and 18, except for eleven states. These eleven states include
Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, South Carolina, and
Texas. These states happen to consider a juvenile as a person under the age of 17.
States including New York and North Carolina consider a juvenile as a person who is
under the age of 16. Typically the criminal majority begins at the ages of 16, 17, or
18 years of age. In France, the article 122-8 of the criminal code defines the criminal
irresponsibility of children under the age 13. Young teenagers between the ages 13
and 18 are assumed irresponsible, but they can as well be involved in a criminal
sentence depending if circumstances and juvenile delinquent personality justify it.
This topic is based on which states include the juvenile death penalty, most states,
teens are just put in a juvenile place until they are the appropriate age for that state
to be placed somewhere else. I have researched some real actual stories about
specific juveniles who have committed crimes at a young age. I have read about a
specific juvenile that was going to be put to death because of a crime that he
committed. Many states have a law of not executing juveniles, so it is usually a hard
decision. This includes juveniles who are under the age of 18 when they committed
a crime. For example, prosecutors in Virginias Prince William County had waited for
a long time to make the decision whether or not to put a juvenile criminal to trial for
one of the ten killings in the month of October in the year of 2002. The 5-4 decision
throws out the death sentences of 72 juvenile murderers and bars states from
seeking to execute several minors for future crimes. The Supreme Court rules that
the juvenile death penalty is considered unconstitutional cruel for juveniles who are
murderers. In 1 5-4 decision in this case, the justices of the supreme court have
discovered that the Constitution forbids executing anyone for a crime that has been
committed before the age of 18. The juvenile death penalty previously was just one
common law. Many juveniles were executed before in the past, but barely ever now.
The ruling ends a practice that was used in 19 different states and tosses out death
sentences of about nearly 70 juvenile murderers. It almost blocks some states from
seeking to execute minors for future crimes that are committed. Retribution versus
the possibility of redemption were at the core of Supreme Court arguments recently
in two specific cases, testing whether it is unconstitutionally considered cruel and
unusual punishment to sentence a juvenile to life in prison without parole, for a
crime that does not even involve a death. Iran agreed recently to review its widely
condemned policy of executing juvenile criminals and has pledged to uphold
freedoms of expression, media and assembly, according to Western officials. In
certain death penalty cases, the determination of guilt or innocence must be decided
separately from when the hearings occur, in which sentences of life imprisonment
or death are decided. The court must consider aggravating and mitigating
circumstances in relation to both crime and the offender of the crime. The death
sentences for certain juveniles must be subject to review by the highest State court
of appeals to ensure that the penalty is in proportion to the gravity of the offense.
They also as well ensure that it is imposed even-handedly under State law. By the
year of 1995, a total of 38 states in the U.S. and the Federal Government had enacted
statutes, which authorized the death penalty for certain specific forms of murder.
People can use the organization to help support and oppose this issue by seeing if
their own opinions and beliefs of their own, different rights match what other
people have to say about the situation and narrow it down to make the decision
whether or not if you support or oppose the issue. A primary purpose of the juvenile
justice system is to hold juvenile offenders accountable as much as possible for
delinquent acts while providing treatment such as rehabilitative services, and
programs designed to prevent from future involvement in law-violating behavior.
Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion and Justice O’Connor’s dissent in Simmons both
argued that foreign sources of law can in fact be relevant to issues before the Court,
even though they ultimately have reached different conclusions as the
constitutionality of the juvenile death penalty. The legitimacy of citation to foreign
sources of law generated comment in all three of the Supreme Court opinions
written in Simmons v. Roper, which was the landmark case that has recently struck
down the juvenile death penalty. Only two months prior to the Court’s decision in
Simmons, Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer met at American University to
debate The Relevance of Foreign Law for American Constitutional Adjudication, this
showing again how important this issue is to the nine sitting Supreme Court justices.
Legal Scholars have played a big role in this particular fight by urging the Supreme
Court to pay more attention to foreign and international sources of law in its
decision making, with academics, including Professor Harold Koh at the vanguard of
the movement to encourage the U.S. courts to pay more attention to international
trends. The juvenile death penalty is a pretty large argument, arguing whether or
not the juvenile death penalty should occur in this world or not. Many people think
that there should be such thing as the juvenile death penalty, just depending on the
crime. At the same time, many other people believe that there shouldn’t be a
juvenile death penalty and just be punished instead with a different punishment
because juveniles are younger and their brains have not been fully developed, so
they can learn from what they did. Congressional Digest is a design that was set up
in the 1920 ratification for the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which
was granting women the right to vote. Alice Gram Robinson was a part of the
Congressional Digest because she has realized that the actions of discerning
students who were a part of the legislative process had several places to turn to. She
also thought that the best way to handle the situation was to provide the congress
with side-by-side arguments pending on the legislation. What this basically means is
that the issue that the eighth amendment states that there should not be cruel or
unusual punishment that causes a long period of time for someone to suffer, so the
states try to avoid a lot of pain than is necessary for a death. An execution method,
including lethal injection that is humane in theory can be carried out by means of
flawed or haphazard procedures that have created a foreseeable danger or inflicting
severe pain in the actual practice. The several states that impose death sentences
have, with near unanimity, adopted lethal injection in order to make executions
painless to the condemned person. An execution procedure creates unnecessary risk
where, taken as a whole, it presents a significant risk of causing severe pain that
could possibly be avoided through the use of a reasonably alternative that is
available or safeguard. Properties and therefore serve no palliative function for a
certain dying patient. At the same time, the use of such drugs brings significant risks
to a patient. Neuromuscular blocking agents can paralyze the patient’s diagram and
cause a patient to asphyxiate. In addition, neuromuscular blocking agents can mask
the physical signs that doctors look for when they are attempting to identify
whether a dying patient is suffering pain or not. Basically, this case is saying that it
agrees with there being such thing as a Juvenile Death Penalty. With all the
experiences with about the different ways that can cause a death for a death penalty
is to see how it would work to execute a human being. Also, the people who are
experiencing are also interested in knowing whether the execution is painful or not,
so it seems like these people aren’t against the juvenile death penalty all the way.
Several features of the history of lethal injection have led the continued repression
of genuine scrutiny of the procedure and its implementation. Petitioners have also
been sentenced in death. The same practical considerations that drove the Court’s
choice of a “substantial risk” standard in Gregg and Farmer apply to the
determination whether a risk of infliction of unnecessary pain rises to the level of a
constitutional violation. In the case “Gregg v. Georgia, during the year of 1976, this
court reaffirmed that capital punishment is constitutional; in doing so, some of the
members of this Court have explained that “a heavy burden rests on those who
would attack the judgment of the representatives of the people” as to how that
punishment should be applied and implemented. It necessarily follows that there
must be some feasible method by which a sentence of death could possibly be
executed, and that such a sentence may be imposed and carried out without a neverending series of demands that a more humane method may exist. I believe that
there should be options depending on how severe the crime was. If the crime was
really bad, enough to the point where the criminal has gone too far with the crime,
then there should be a sentence to death. Also, I believe that if the crime wasn’t bad
enough to deserve death, depending on what the court decides, then the punishment
should just be a never-ending series of demands. To the contrary, the Court has
rejected challenges to executions by firing squad and electrocution and, at the same
time, made clear that jurisdictions are not required to use the absolute “best”
method that is available of execution: i.e, the method that is believed to cause the
least amount of pain when compared to other methods. Any certain type of risk of
pain inherent in lethal injection is manifestly “one that today’s society chooses to
tolerate.” –Helling v. McKinney, which occurred during the year of 1993. While the
Constitution protects against any officials who are deliberately indifferent to a
constitutionally significant risk of pain that is difficult to bare with, Petitioners have
failed to show that Respondents are acting with anything close to deliberate
indifference.