It is a commonly accepted idea that children under the age of 18 can not be compared to adults as they are not able to function as adults. This is one of the main reasons why the juridical system tries to find the correct ways to protect children in case they do their wrong choices and to provide the second chance for them. People under 18 are not taking part in voting, they do not have to go to the military service, but still in some states the laws subscribe the death penalty for their crimes even of they didn’t reach their adulthood. The Supreme Court of the USA prohibits executing children under the age of 15.
There is a ban in the Constitution concerning “cruel and unusual punishment” and an important question was for the Supreme Court of the USA whether the death punishment of a child of sixteen – seventeen could be considered breaking this ban. This bright discussion started after the death sentence of Christopher Simmons, who was only 17.
We all know that teenagers are usually aware of their actions, but some recent medical researches prove that they can not be as well accountable as adults. “Studies by the Harvard Medical School, the National Institute of Mental Health and the UCLA’s Department of Neuroscience finds that the frontal and pre-frontal lobes of the brain, which regulate impulse control and judgment, are not fully developed in adolescents” (4). The development is actually completed when a person is about 18-22 years old. The adolescents are usually more impulsive, they usually make strict judgements about events and people in their lives, they are neither completely aware of all the consequences of their actions.
There are even cases when because of their immaturity the teenagers are easily influenced by the adult criminals, there are also examples when the adolescents are taken advantage of during some investigations. They are luckily to give out confessions which are not true, in case they are intimidated by adults and authority people. They think little about their Miranda Rights, about their right of legal representation.
Very important fact is that the goals of death penalty can not be applied to teenagers, they are really capable of rehabilitation and as they are emotionally immature, they can not be considered to be the “worst of the worse”.
In general the public opinion in the USA is against the execution of juvenile offenders. In 2003 about 69% of people are against the death penalty towards juveniles, about 22% voted for executing the young criminals, and 5% of people couldn’t not come out with their opinion.
Most of the other countries consider the capital punishment of juveniles inhumane and anachronistic. “The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights bans the execution of juvenile offenders. Although the United States has signed the ICCPR and therefore agreed to be bound by its standards, the U.S. has reserved the right to execute juvenile offenders as long as our Constitution is interpreted to permit the practice” (1).
Nowadays only 123 countries use death penalty and among them all only USA and Iraq apply capital punishment to juveniles. In the year 2003 the authorities of Iraq started to consider the bill which will be supposed to arise the age of the criminals who could be sentenced to death from fifteen to eighteen. Children under eighteen won’t be convicted to long life imprisonment or lashing. We know that such countries as Yemen, Chine, Zimbabwe, wrote the laws prohibiting death penalty toward juveniles. In the year 2000, Pakistan “moved to outlaw the execution of juvenile offenders under the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance” (3). But in November 2001 Ali Sher was executed for the crime he committed at the age of 13. After this case the President Musharrah changed the death penalty of about 100 juveniles to imprisonment. Later on the Supreme Court of the country provided the decision to “peruse and define laws relating to the imposition of the death sentence (on) young people.” (3).
The domestic law of Chine also prohibits the death penalty towards juveniles, but in 2003 Zhao Lin was executed for the crime he committed when he was only 16.
The United Nations Convention (Article 37(a)) does not provide that - capital punishment and life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age. The United States is the only country in the world that has not yet ratified this international agreement, in large part because of our desire to remain free to retain the death penalty for juvenile offenders” (4).
However the USA is the only country since 1998 which executed juveniles regularly and the country is know for the number of executions which exceeds the number of executions in all other nations combined.
It was already mentioned that many researches showed that juveniles are less mature and less culpable than grown- up people. At this age the cognitive abilities, emotions, impulse control, the sense of identity, brains are only at their development stage. Thus we come to the conclusion that juveniles are not only physically but morally as well are much different from adults. The “extent of change that can occur in the (adolescent) brain...” has been heralded as “one (of) the most remarkable findings in neuro-biology of the last decade…” (National Research Council, 1999).