History
Pre-Furman
Since 1642, in the Thirteen Colonies, the United States under the Articles of Confederation, and the United States under the Constitution, an estimated 364 juveniles have been put to death by the individual states (colonies, before 1776) and the federal government. The first confirmed juvenile to be executed in the United States was Thomas Granger, executed for buggery involving several animals, including "a mare, a cow, two goats, divers sheep, two calves, and a turkey." The execution took place on September 8, 1642, 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 by hanging in Georgia 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] His 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 researcher M. 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), was George Stinney, who was electrocuted 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, a Native American, was 10 years old when he was involved in a robbery and murder in Arkansas. However, Arcene was not recaptured until 1884. He was 23 years old when he was executed on June 18, 1885. [9]
The last person to be executed for a crime committed at the age of 14 was 15-year-old James Lewis Jr. in Mississippi on July 23, 1947. The last person to be executed for a crime committed at the age of 15 was 18-year-old Irvin Mattio in Louisiana on January 9, 1948. [10] Going forward, all executions of juvenile offenders were of those who were at least 16 years old at the time of their crimes. The last judicially-approved execution of a juvenile was 17-year-old Leonard Shockley, who was executed in Maryland on April 10, 1959, for a murder committed when he was 16. Shockley was also the last person to be executed for a crime committed at the age of 16 in the pre-Furman era. 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 the gang rape of a woman when he was 17. Echols was the last juvenile offender to be executed in the United States prior to Furman v. Georgia . [11] [12]
The peak decade for juvenile executions was the 1940s, when approximately 58 juvenile offenders were executed in the United States. [13] Additionally, on June 1, 1945, the United 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 of World War II. The two men were part of the Werwolf, a Nazi plan to continue resist after the occupation of Germany Although the sentences normally would've been commuted to prison terms, the sentences were upheld in order to intimidate Nazi fanatics into ceasing all resistance. [14] [15]
Post-Furman
Since the reinstatement of the capital punishment in 1976 [17] when the Supreme Court ruled that it did not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel 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 under Roper. [18]
Due to the process of appeals 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.
In Thompson 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 case Stanford v. Kentucky , it upheld capital punishment for crimes committed aged 16 or 17. Justice Scalia's plurality part of his opinion famously criticized Justice Brennan's dissent by accusing it of "replac[ing] judges of the law with a committee of philosopher-kings". [19] 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 overruled Stanford. Justice Kennedy, who concurred with Scalia's opinion in Stanford, instead wrote the opinion of the court in Roper and became the key vote. Justice O'Connor dissented.
Before 2005, of the 38 U.S. states that allowed capital punishment:
- 19 states and the federal government had set a minimum age of 18,
- 5 states had set a minimum age of 17, and
- 14 states had explicitly set a minimum age of 16, or were subject to the Supreme Court's imposition of that minimum.
At the time of the Roper 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. [20] A 72th juvenile offender, serial killer Harvey Miguel Robinson, remained on death row since he had received two additional death sentences for murders committed at age 18. [21]
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. [17]