Death Penalty for Juveniles:
The application of death penalty for crimes committed by child offenders is strictly prohibited under the international human rights law. Still, there are several nations using this law and are executing juvenile offenders. As against the total number of executions conducted globally, executions of juvenile offenders are few.
The infliction for the death penalties for juveniles, and the number of nations applying it, have been gradually reducing over the past decade. Further, the practice of the execution of minors at the time of their crime has been directly opposed and prohibited by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the American Convention on Human Rights, and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
As part of its criminal justice system, the U.S. is the only nation that continues to execute juvenile criminals.
Juvenile offenders are minors or under-18 children who committed a crime or offence before they turn 18 years of age, as defined by the U.N. CRC. It was crucial to establish this age threshold for protecting children since once cannot expect them to attain the same degree of neurological and psychological growth as an adult, even after they become teenagers. It has been suggested by experts that these juveniles do not possess the same capacity as an adult to be able to use reasonable decisions and judgements, for preventing harmful or unfitting behaviour produced as a result of extreme emotional fluctuations and fear, and for understanding the long-term outcomes of rash actions. Hence, in order for the justice system to consider age as a factor, child offender in conflict with the law must get special treatments. However, it has been shown that specific extreme punishments and sentences that are relevant to adults cannot be applied to children (Vega and Nelson).
Apparently, the HRA (Human Rights Advocates) presented a written statement to the Human Right Council as an attempt to tackle the imposition of life imprisonment without release, death penalty, and corporal punishment on juveniles. Since several decades, there has been exponential progress towards abolishing these sentences and extreme punishments. Nonetheless, many states and nations still continue to face enforcement issues. Additionally, there has been a major concern for the HRA who has detected that some juvenile criminals are frequently punished under laws applicable to adults, either because they are viewed as adults under the state’s explanation of a child, or due to mistakes in discriminating the actual age of juveniles. HRA particularly addresses the latter issue that is faced by several states and usually views teenage offenders as adults which applying criminal justice laws.
Anti-death penalty critics have continued to argue that the cost of the execution and prosecution of an inmate has a higher cost than the cost of keeping the same offender in prisoner for a lifetime. Global criminal justice systems and legislators have employed the abolition of the death penalty for its high cost. According to a Kansas legislative report, the median cost of applying and processing a death penalty case is $1.2 million, which is as much as 70% higher than the cost of a murder case wherein the death penalty was not sought after. Similar results were obtained from research conducted in Carolina, Indiana, California, Washington, Tennessee, and New Jersey. It is important to note that death penalty cases cost much higher in terms of prosecution, investigation, and appeal as compared to non-death or life sentence murder cases. In addition to this, nearly 25% to 30% of all death penalty cases are overturned on appeal which clearly indicates that several offenders, both juveniles and adults, sentenced to death might have been mistakenly convicted or the judicial system has failed to implement the death penalty law suitably.
Interestingly, cases of- juvenile death sentences are high in developed countries with the United States topping the list. The nation has the maximum state-sanctioned executions of child offenders. This clearly showcases a shift away from the historical intentions of separate juvenile justice arrangements.
Stressing mainly on the criticality of the crime, without significant analysis of the juvenile’s actual age as a mitigating factor, is a contradictory understanding of the research that adolescence is a transitional period, when the emotions, impulse control, identity, cognitive abilities, judgement, and the brain are still under development, primarily in the context of family ties, kinships, relationships, social and moral values, and communities.
Since the onset of the advanced American death penalty era in 1973, the re-introduction of capital punishment for criminal committing crimes earlier than the age bar of 18 years has derived from two trends:
(1) the ever increasing juvenile waiver or transfer statutes to criminal court jurisdiction,
(2) the expansion of capital punishment in the adult criminal justice system.
There have been the following claims from the advocates of the death penalty for people committing crimes younger than 18 years of age:
• The United States leads in the rate of violent juvenile crimes as compared to other developed countries.
• Until the 1990s, juvenile homicide was rising, while adult homicide was decreasing.
• Child capital offenders seem to be deprived of a conscience and to be unsupportive towards rehabilitation efforts.
• Frequently, political leaders recommend for more grave punishments for child offenders, which can be popular with their constituency.
• The public can notice an immediate retributive result when a juvenile offender is subjected to death penalty sentence, while improvement of social conditions that encourage youth crime is a costly and lengthy process that operates with trial and error.
On the contrary, a nationwide survey revealed that only 26% of Americans believing in capital punishment endorse the execution of offenders who were juveniles at the times of their offenses (Brewer, 2001).
Yet, there are opponents of the death penalty ruling for juveniles whose responses counter these arguments:
•Most of the juvenile offenders have suffered through severe physical and/or emotional abuse and injury; these minors must be given a chance to contribute as potential members of society through professional treatment, rehab, and counselling interventions.
• Years between 1994 and 2000 saw a dramatic drop is homicides committed by youth
• The discouraging objective that capital punishment proposes to serve does not efficiently apply to child offenders, who usually have a blurred perception of death and presume themselves as immortal (Tuell, 2002).
• The retributive aim of the death penalty needs to be seriously questioned when the juvenile committed a crime as a minor, while being in society’s protection.
• Furthermore, imposing the death penalty to juvenile crimes is a limited efficacy remedy. There is a need to derive a more efficient, preventive, and large-scale solution by focusing resources and establishing partnerships to strengthen the family bonds, school, and community resources accessible by every youth.
Moreover, proponents for eliminating the juvenile death penalty highlight many additional factors, thereby indicating an imminent ban on the juvenile death penalty within the United States.
These factors are:
• Lately, the suspension on the death penalty by some U.S. governors while commissions re-assess the capital punishment law,
• The decreasing rates of death sentences for juveniles,
• Increasing interest of state legislative in abolishing the death penalty for crimes committed by offenders under 18 years of age, and
• The constant international pressure on the U.S. to adhere to international law (Tuell, 2002).
Such studies are also significantly based on the substantial scientific advances in the study of early brain development and childhood as well as adolescent behavioural patterns and development that have been made over the past two decades.
U.S.’s legal approval of capital punishment for juveniles aging 16 and above breaches the two main tenets of international law: international treaties and customary international law. An international consensus exists opposing the imposition of the death penalty for juvenile capital crimes. Due to America’s resistance to such a consensus does not make it the leading nation that implements human rights standards. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and the American Convention on Human Rights are international treaties which directly prohibit the application of the death penalty to child offenders. . Although the U. S. sanctioned and verified ICCPR, it still holds the right to ignore the covenant’s ban on executing juveniles. The U.S. is the only nation of the 144 signatories that reserves this right, which was objected by eleven countries.
This reservation held by the U.S. was seen as international human rights violation. The U.S. and Somalia are the only nations that have not signed the UN CRC out of 154 UN countries. The convention opposes the imposition of life imprisonment and capital punishment for offenders who committed crimes below 18 years of age. Nonetheless, the U.S. ratified the convention in 1995 with a renewed reservation and exempted itself from complying with the juvenile death penalty prohibition.
The execution of juveniles’ violation of customary international law was reiterated in August 2000 by the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. A practice, for becoming a part of customary international law, must be far-flung, and states-nations need to follow the practice according to legal obligation. Iran, the U.S., and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are the only countries executing minors. Recently, Yemen, Pakistan, and China banned the use of capital punishment for minors. Other nations are continuously applying economic and diplomatic pressure on the U. S. to prohibit the death penalty for people committing capital offenses while being under age.
This research study builds and reaffirms the notion that people below 18 years of age are still undergoing a substantial changes physiological and emotional development thereby affecting their emotions, brain development, cognitive skills, judgment, impulse control, and identity. Due to this immaturity, Americans do not permit under age children to undertake the prime duties of adulthood such as alcohol consumption, voting, services in military combat, or sitting on a jury. A significant number of variables tend to impact a youth’s development and consequent reactions to social and environmental stimuli that were beyond the control of that youth. After examining this assumption in a study of medical histories of violent juvenile offenders, researchers detected a significantly higher occurrence of neuropsychiatric and cognitive disabilities amongst the most aggressive offenders, such as hyperactivity, impulsivity, learning problems, and attention deficits. “The parts of the brain responsible for judgment, impulse control, and reality testing are disproportionately impaired in this population, along with the capacity for empathy and the ability to accurately interpret other people’s actions and intentions” (Karr-Morse & Wiley, 1997). “Without positive interventions to redirect the youth’s development, an absence common to so many of the youth who subsequently become involved in serious delinquent or criminal activity, these youth are inappropriately subjected to the ultimate sanction without adequate regard for these mitigating circumstances” (Tuell, 2002).
Since 2002, 80 out of the current death row convicts in the U. S. were sentenced as adults for crimes committed when they were below 18 years of age (Focus on Capital Punishment, 2002). These prisoners are males who were convicted of murder, constituting nearly 2.2% of the total death row population in the U. S.
Furthermore, more than two-thirds of these inmates are minorities, representing the stark racial inequality in the juvenile justice system (Drizin & Harper, 2000). These convicts have been on death row for between 2 months and more than two decades (Streib, 2002). Even though there is strict opposition from the federal government, 27 states, and the District of Columbia continue to execute offenders who commit crimes as juveniles, there are still 23 states permitting capital punishment for juveniles.
References;
Vega, C. & Nelson, C. Update on the Juvenile Death Penalty. International Civil Liberties Report. Retrieved from http://www.aclu.org/files/iclr/delavega.pdf.
Drizin, S. A., & Harper, S. K. (2000, April 16). Old enough to kill, old enough to die. San Francisco Chronicle, A24.
Karr-Morse, R., & Wiley, M. S. (1997). Ghosts from the nursery: Tracing the roots
of violence. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Streib, V. L. (2002). The juvenile death penalty today: Death sentences and executions for juvenile crimes, January 1, 1973–June 30, 2002. Retrieved August 14, 2002, from http://www.law.onu.edu/faculty/streib/juvdeath.htm.
Tuell, S. (2002). Juvenile Offenders and the Death Penalty. Child Welfare League of America. United States. Retrieved from http://www.cwla.org/programs/juvenilejustice/juveniledeathpenalty.pdf.
