Even with the United States, the federal government and 15 of the 38 states that impose capital punishment prohibit the death penalty for crimes committed by those under the age of 18. While the American Bar Association believes that young people who commit violent crimes should be appropriately punished, it has long opposed imposition of the death penalty on any person for an offense committed while he was younger than 18. Recognizing the paired trends of a growing reliance on capital punishment generally and a growing willingness to prosecute juveniles as adults, the ABA in 1983 cited a looming specter of juvenile executions, but could find no rational justification for killing juvenile offenders. We know that adolescents lack a full appreciation of the consequences of their actions, and that juveniles sometimes make rash and terrible decisions because they are young and havent developed the judgment we expect of adults. For this reason, juveniles cannot vote or serve as jurors.
Experts confirm that capital punishment has little or no deterrent value for adolescents.
With no deterrent benefit, the only possible rationale to execute those who killed when they were juveniles is to satisfy our need for vengeance. Many of the young men on death row have crippling mental or behavioral disorders, or have suffered horribly from physical, psychological and sexual abuse. It reflects more upon us as a society than it does on the offender that we would seek legal vengeance through execution for the crimes of a child. The change of a year is a time of looking both back in time and forward. The change of a century, and indeed of a millennium, is even more emphatically a time of measuring measuring progress along with time.