Juvenile Offenders & Equal Justice
by Under our current system, juveniles convicted of the same class felony as adults often get harsher sentences. Requiring a juvenile convicted of a class B felony to be sentenced under class C felony guidelines, allows the law to acknowledge the difference between juvenile and adult offenders. This takes public safety into consideration by allowing the case to be handled in adult court due to the severity of the crime. Being a juvenile would then be properly acknowledged as a mitigation defense for the rest of juvenile offenders.
In Roper V. Simmons (2005), the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to execute children. For all America’s lip service to human rights, we were at the end of the line when it came to how our system treated juvenile offenders. ”Our determination that the death penalty is disproportionate punishment for offenders under 18 finds confirmation in the stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty,” Roper.
In fairness to the dissenters on the Court, this is not the best way to determine our laws. However, because so many State legislatures abdicated their responsibility in addressing this issue, the Supreme Court was in the awkward position of either acknowledging a wrongful practice, and be labeled judicial activists, or allow the United States to be discredited as a moral authority and appear ridiculously cruel.
We must commend those State legislatures that condemned executing juveniles prior to the Court’s decision, for that legislation played a role in the Court’s conclusion that the practice was cruel and unusual punishment:
[1] The prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments,” like other expansive language in the Constitution, must be interpreted according to its text, by considering history, tradition, and precedent, and with due regard for its purpose and function in the constitutional design. To implement this framework we have established the propriety and affirmed the necessity of referring to the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” to determine which punishments are so disproportionate as to be cruel and unusual. Trop V. Dulles
Just as those State legislatures brave enough to condemn executing juveniles were used in Roper as precedent to demonstrate an evolving standard of decency, they were also used in Atkins to justify condemning the execution of the mentally retarded.
“We held that standards of decency have evolved since Penry and now demonstrate that the execution of the mentally retarded is cruel and unusual punishment. The Court noted that objective indicia of society’s standards, as expressed in legislative enactments and state practice with respect to executions of the mentally retarded. When Atkins was decided only a minority of States permitted the practice, and even in those States it was rare. On the basis of these indicia the Court determined that executing mentally retarded offenders “has become truly unusual, and it is fair to say a national consensus has developed against it.”
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