In the United States,capital punishment for juveniles existed until March 2, 2005, when theU.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional inRoper v. Simmons. Prior toRoper, there were 71 people on death row in the United States for crimes committed as juveniles.[1] The last juvenile offender to be executed in the United States was 32-year-oldScott Hain inOklahoma in 2003. The last female juvenile offender to be executed in the United States wasVirginia Christian, who was executed inVirginia in 1912.
The death penalty for juveniles in the United States was first applied in 1642. Before the 1972Furman v. Georgia ruling that instituted a death penalty moratorium nationwide, there were approximately 343 executions of juveniles in the United States. In the years following the 1976Gregg v. Georgia ruling that overturnedFurman and upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, there were 22 executions of juvenile offenders before the practice was outlawed, albeit one of them had received another death sentence for a separate murder committed at age 18.
Prior toRoper, states had varying minimum ages for defendants to qualify for the death penalty; 19 states did not permit the execution of juveniles, while the remaining 19 retentionist states allowed juveniles as young as 16 or 17 at the time of their crime to be executed, albeit due to lengthy appeals processes, none of them were still juveniles by the time of their executions.
Since 1642, in theThirteen Colonies, the United States under theArticles of Confederation, and the United States under theConstitution, an estimated 364juveniles have been put to death by the individualstates (colonies, before 1776) and thefederal government. The first confirmed juvenile to be executed in the United States wasThomas Granger, executed forbuggery involving several animals, including "a mare, a cow, two goats, divers sheep, two calves, and a turkey." The execution took place on September 8, when Granger was 16 or 17 years old; prior to the execution, the animals involved in Granger's case were slaughtered in front of him.[2][3]
The youngest person to have been executed in the 20th century was likely Joe Persons, a black boy executed byhanging inGeorgia on September 24, 1915, for raping an 8-year-old white girl in June 1915. Persons admitted his guilt to the nearly 50 witnesses present while on the gallows.[4] Persons' age has not been confirmed; while he was reportedly 13 at the time of the crime's commission, he was variously reported to have been 12, 13, 14, 15, or "not older than 14" at the time of his execution. He weighed only 65 pounds, leading contemporary death penalty researcherM. Watt Espy to posit that Persons was likely closer to 12 than he was to 15.[5][6][7][8]
The second youngest person to be executed, and the youngest to have a confirmed birth date (of October 21, 1929), wasGeorge Stinney, who waselectrocuted in South Carolina at the age of 14 on June 16, 1944, after the bodies of two children (ages 7 and 11) were found close to his home. George Stinney maintained that he was innocent and that his confession had been coerced while in custody. The verdict of this case was posthumously overturned in 2014.
James Arcene, aNative American, was 10 years old when he was involved in a robbery and murder inArkansas. However, Arcene was not recaptured until 1884. He was 23 years old when he was executed on June 18, 1885.[9]
The last judicially-approved execution of a juvenile was convicted murdererLeonard Shockley, who died in a Marylandgas chamber on April 10, 1959, at the age of 17. Nobody has been under the age of 19 at the time of execution since 1964, when 19-year-old James Andrew Echols was executed in Texas for participating thegang rape of a woman when he was 17. Echols was the last juvenile offender to be executed in the United States prior toFurman v. Georgia.[10][11]
The peak decade for juvenile executions was the 1940s, when 58 people who were under 18 at the times of their crimes were put to death.[12] Additionally, on June 1, 1945, theUnited States Army executed two German youths, 16-year-old Heinz Petry and 17-year-old Josef Schöner, for espionage committed against American forces during the final stages ofWorld War II.[13][14]
Since thereinstatement of the capital punishment in 1976[16] when the Supreme Court ruled that it did not violate theEighth Amendment's prohibition againstcruel and unusual punishment, 22 people have been executed for crimes committed while they were under the age of 18. All of the 22 executed individuals were males, and all were in states located in the South. Twenty-one of them were age 17 when the crime occurred; one,Sean Sellers was 16 years old when he murdered his mother, stepfather, and a store clerk. One, Jay Kelly Pinkerton, had received another death sentence for a separate murder committed at age 18 and would not have been spared execution underRoper.[17]
Due to the process ofappeals since 1976, all 22 juvenile offenders were adults when they were executed. The youngest at the time of execution was Steve Edward Roach, who was 23. The oldest at the time of execution was Joseph John Cannon, who was 38. Jay Kelly Pinkerton was executed solely for the murder he committed at age 17 since he exhausted his appeals in that case first.
InThompson v. Oklahoma (1988), the Supreme Court first held unconstitutional imposition of the death penalty for crime committed aged 15 or younger. But in the 1989 caseStanford v. Kentucky, it upheld capital punishment for crimes committed aged 16 or 17.Justice Scalia's plurality part of his opinion famously criticizedJustice Brennan's dissent by accusing it of "replac[ing] judges of the law with a committee ofphilosopher-kings".[18]Justice O'Connor was the key vote in both cases, being the lone justice to concur in the two.
Sixteen years later,Roper v. Simmons overruledStanford.Justice Kennedy, who concurred with Scalia's opinion inStanford, instead wrote the opinion of the court inRoper and became the key vote. Justice O'Connor dissented.
Before 2005, of the 38 U.S. states that allowed capital punishment:
At the time of theRoper v. Simmons decision, there were 71 juvenile offenders were on death row: 13 in Alabama; four in Arizona; three in Florida; two in Georgia; four in Louisiana; five in Mississippi; one in Nevada; four in North Carolina; two in Pennsylvania; three in South Carolina; 29 in Texas; and one in Virginia.[19] A 72th juvenile offender, serial killerHarvey Miguel Robinson, remained on death row since he had received two additional death sentences for murders committed at age 18.[20]
Few juveniles have ever been executed for their crimes. Even when juveniles were sentenced to death, few of them were executed. In the United States for example, youths under the age of 18 were executed at a rate of 20–27 per decade, or about 1.6–2.3% of all executions from 1880s to the 1920s. This has dropped significantly when only 3 juveniles, one of whom waived his appeals and one of whom was also condemned for a murder committed as an adult, were executed between January 1977 and November 1986.[16]
Indicates cases where the executed defendant was under another sentence of death for a separate murder committed as an adult
| No. | Name | Date of execution | Ethnicity | Age | Method | State | Victims | Ref. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| At offense | At execution | ||||||||
| 1 | Charles Francis Rumbaugh | September 11, 1985 | White | 17 | 28 | Lethal injection | Texas | Michael Fiorillo, 58, white | [21] |
| 2 | James Terry Roach | January 10, 1986 | 25 | Electrocution | South Carolina | Carlotta Harris and Thomas Taylor, 14 and 17, white | [22] | ||
| 3 | Jay Kelly Pinkerton | May 15, 1986 | White | 17[a] | 24 | Lethal injection | Texas | Sarah Donn Lawrence, 30, white[b] | [23] |
| 4 | Dalton Prejean | May 18, 1990 | Black | 17 | 30 | Electrocution | Louisiana | Donald Cleveland, 25, white (officer)[c] | [24] |
| 5 | Johnny Frank Garrett | February 11, 1992 | White | 28 | Lethal injection | Texas | Tadea Benz, 76, white | [25] | |
| 6 | Curtis Paul Harris | July 1, 1993 | Black | 31 | Timothy Michael Merka, 27, white | [26] | |||
| 7 | Frederick Lashley | July 28, 1993 | 29 | Missouri | Janie Tracy, 55, black (foster mother) | [27] | |||
| 8 | Ruben Montoya Cantu | August 24, 1993 | Hispanic | 26 | Texas | Pedro Gomez, 25, Hispanic | [28] | ||
| 9 | Christopher Burger | December 7, 1993 | White | 33 | Electrocution | Georgia | Roger Honeycutt, 25, white | [29] | |
| 10 | Joseph John Cannon | April 24, 1998 | 38 | Lethal injection | Texas | Anne Walsh, 45, white | [30] | ||
| 11 | Robert Anthony Carter | May 18, 1998 | Black | 34 | Sylvia Reyes, 17, Hispanic[d] | [31] | |||
| 12 | Dwayne Allen Wright | October 14, 1998 | 26 | Virginia | Saba Tekle, 34, black[e] | [32] | |||
| 13 | Sean Richard Sellers | February 4, 1999 | White | 16 | 29 | Oklahoma | Three people, white[f] | [33] | |
| 14 | Douglas Christopher Thomas | January 10, 2000 | 17 | 26 | Virginia | James B. Wiseman and Kathy J. Wiseman, both 33, white | [34] | ||
| 15 | Steve Edward Roach | January 13, 2000 | 23 | Mary Ann Hughes, 70, white | [35] | ||||
| 16 | Glen Charles McGinnis | January 25, 2000 | Black | 27 | Texas | Leta Ann Wilkerson, 30, white | [36] | ||
| 17 | Gary Lee Graham | June 22, 2000 | 36 | Bobby Grant Lambert, 53, white | [37] | ||||
| 18 | Gerald Lee Mitchell | October 22, 2001 | 33 | Charles Angelo Marino, 20, white[g] | [38] | ||||
| 19 | Napoleon Beazley | May 28, 2002 | 25 | John E. Luttig, 63, white | [39] | ||||
| 20 | T.J. Jones | August 8, 2002 | Willard Lewis Davis, 75, white | [40] | |||||
| 21 | Toronto Markkey Patterson | August 28, 2002 | 24 | Ollie Brown, 3, black (cousin's dughter)[h] | [41] | ||||
| 22 | Scott Allen Hain | April 3, 2003 | White | 32 | Oklahoma | Michael William Houghton and Laura Lee Sanders, 27 and 22, white | [42] | ||
Joe Persons, a 13-year-old negro boy, was executed in Jackson, Ga., today.
Joe Persons, a negro boy not more than 14 years old, was legally hanged at Jackson, Ga., Friday for criminally assaulting a white child 8 years old. The boy admitted his guilt and said he was ready to die. He weighed on [sic] 75 pounds.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)When Joe Persons was hanged at Jackson, Ga., on Sept. 24, 1915, contemporary newspaper accounts estimated his age as being "from 12 to 15," but the same accounts, saying that he weighed only 65 pounds, would indicate that he was nearer the former than the latter age. Because he was so immature and underdeveloped, local officials actually debated the practicality of adding weights to his body to ensure a successful hanging.