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In the United States, capital punishment for juveniles existed until March 2, 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in Roper v. Simmons. Prior to Roper, there were 71 people on death row in the United States for crimes committed as juveniles. [1] The death penalty for juveniles in the United States was first applied in 1642.
Twenty-two juvenile offenders were executed in the United States in the three decades between the Supreme Court decisions upholding the constitutionality of capital punishment in 1976 and the execution bar announced in Roper (see map, below). Those 22 executions comprised about 2% of the executions carried out in that time period.
While the death penalty was allowed in Maryland, it was only applied to persons who were adults at the time of their crimes, whereas Virginia had also allowed the death penalty for offenders who had been juveniles when their crimes were committed.
Key Supreme Court Cases on the Death Penalty for Juveniles The constitutionality of executing persons for crimes committed when they were under the age of 18 is an issue that the Supreme Court has evaluated in several cases since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
On March 24, 2021, Governor Ralph Northam signed legislation to end the death penalty in Virginia and reduce the sentences of the commonwealth’s two death-row prisoners to life without parole. On February 3, the Virginia Senate had voted along party lines, 21-17, in favor of abolishing capital punishment.
As of February 28, 2005, the day before Roper v. Simmons was decided, 71 persons were on death row for juvenile crimes. These 71 condemned juvenile offenders constituted about 2% of the total death row population of 3,471. Although all were ages 16 or 17 at the time of their crimes, their ages range from 18 to 43 when Roper was decided.
1 mar 2005 · Ten years ago, on March 1, 2005, the United States Supreme Court, in Roper v. Simmons, finally abolished the juvenile death penalty. The decision ended a barbaric part of our criminal justice history and aligned our juvenile sentencing practices with those of every other nation in the world.
