Posted on: Friday, October 25, 2002

EDITORIAL
Executions of juveniles are utterly uncivilized

The U.S. Supreme Court has deemed that it is cruel and unusual punishment to impose the death penalty on the mentally retarded.

Yet in another ruling rejecting the appeal of a Kentucky man who was convicted of raping and murdering a gas station attendant while he was a minor, the high court has upheld the execution of convicted minors who are older than 15.

And so, to our dismay, the United States remains the sole Western democracy that executes minors. About 2 percent of the 3,700 people on America's death row are juveniles.

The typical death row juvenile offender is a 17-year-old African American or Hispanic male who killed a white adult. Needless to say, they don't get the kind of high-power legal representation that O.J. Simpson was able to afford.

Sure, teenagers are capable of committing heinous crimes. And they do, and should be punished appropriately.

But in our opinion, the court's reason for banning the execution of mentally retarded people should apply just as forcefully to juvenile offenders under the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Why? Because like the mentally retarded, juveniles lack the capacity to evaluate the consequences of their conduct.

Plus, there's no evidence whatsoever that the death penalty serves as a deterrent against the homicidal impulses of wayward teenagers, many of whom are either self-destructive or view themselves as immortal.

Troubled adolescents — and it would be hard to argue that adolescents who kill are not troubled — tend to act on impulse without regard to the consequences. Oftentimes, they're the product of ghastly family circumstances.

As Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer point out in their dissenting opinion, they're not really mentally stable.

"Neuroscientific evidence of the last few years has revealed that adolescent brains are not fully developed, which often leads to erratic behaviors and thought processes in that age group," they wrote.

Besides, who is the Supreme Court to determine which juvenile offender is salvageable in the sense of maturing into a productive and law-abiding adult?

At the end of the day, we'd rather the judicial branch quit altogether this drawing of lines between who should and who shouldn't be executed based on age and mental capacity, and ban capital punishment.