Introduction: The death penalty issue has always been one of the most important

issues of the contemporary system of justice. Years ago the majority of the criminals
were male over 20, but nowadays the situation has quite changed. Not only grown-ups
but also by children who are under 18 years old nowadays commit murders and other
terrible crimes. Ordinarily, a young criminal is not applied the same restrictions for
his crime as a grown criminal is, nevertheless if it especially goes about capital crimes
people start talking about the death penalty for such juveniles. A child always remains
a child and if he commits a crime it is not because he has had a good life. It is not the
guilt of the children, but their big misfortune. It is a misfortune of not having anybody
to love and truly support them and lead them in the correct direction. Along with that
it is common knowledge that the period of 11 through 17 is a period of an especially
intensive change both in the organism and the mind of a child. That is why it is not
fair to put a child in the same line with a grown up that can be completely responsible
for his actions. A child is not mentally capable of comprehending the crime he or she
commits. The system of values in the age under 18 is not built yet, other people can
easily influence children and the psychic processes are not stable yet. Under these
conditions a child should never be sentences to death or a life sentence for they still
have a chance to change and re-evaluate their life. If the aim of the prison is to change
criminals for better then children under 18 should become the material for changes
of the highest priority.
The year of 1988 was an extremely important year of the United States of America in
terms of the death penalty for adolescent criminals. Before that time even a fifteen
year old could be a subject to a death penalty for capital crimes. The Supreme Court
in 1988 refused to use death penalty over those criminals that were under the age of
sixteen. Nevertheless the 1988 decision did not influence many states and for
instance, the state of Texas1conducted its last death penalty over a juvenile in 2002.
The U.S. Supreme Court has always called the execution of children a violation of the
Constitution, where a child is every person under the age of eighteen years old.
Nowadays 19 out of 51 state allow the conduction of the death penalty over children
who are sixteen and seventeen years old. The death penalty of children fewer than
eighteen years old is immoral, for killing a child implies killing a weaker human being
that simply required supervision and attention from the side of his parents. As each
society tends to be more humanistic, the probability of the fact that an eighteen-yearold is as guilty as a grown-up criminal starts being completely neglected. One of the
main cases of the modernity was the case of 2004 of Roper v. Simmons. This was a
fight between two completely opposite opinions one was that death penalty for
juveniles is completely normal, as the capital crimes they commit are sometimes even
worse then those committed by the grown criminals; and the other side was that death
penalty for juveniles is completely unconstitutional and absolutely immoral as they
are only children and not mature grown ups able to be fully responsible for their
actions.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Society for
Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and
the American Psychiatric Association have claimed that facts against the death penalty
for children under the age of eighteen.
The main reason of such statement is the fact that the researchers reveals: the
prefrontal cortex, situated in the frontal lobe of a human being whish is responsible
for the formation of the most important functions of the brain finished its completely
formation after everything else, so is the part that forms the longest amount of time
[3]. According to the Wall Street Journal the prefrontal cortex is the management
center of the human brain as it is the part responsible for the most important function
planning, anticipation of the consequences, controlling the impulses and is
responsible for abstract thinking. And the most important fact is that this part of the
brain is a subject to continuing formation until a human being is twenty-years-old.
The second vital piece of information is that the decision making process in
adulthood is controlled by amygdala, known as the most primitive part of the human
brain and therefore is the center of impulses and emotions.
These facts emphasize the notion that the change of the brain during the period of
adolescence is immense and this is the reason young people reveal a big deal of the
irrational behavior of the humanity. Children should not be sentences to death as the
development and therefore the functioning of the brain is not the same for teenagers
and adults. The line for death penalty should be drawn at age 18 because at these age
the majority of the processes stabilize and rich the state of full brain formation. Even if
a child knows what is not right to do, but he or she may still perform a behavior that
would not be socially appropriate and may even damage the lives of other people
because of the their mental incapability to evaluate their behavior properly.
So, according to the age peculiarities a teenager under the age of eighteen by no
means should become a subject of death penalty. Some congressmen still tried to
apply death penalty through lethal injection to guilty juveniles sixteen years of age.
Such proposed legislations are truly inhumane and break all the moral laws and the
rights that every child possesses. In case the Congress approved such legislation as a
reaction the protests would have been tremendous, as killing people that have not
even reached their mental and physical development potential means killing a person
that is not able to take full responsibility for his or her actions.
There is not secret that the United Nations Organization has signed the United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and especially its Article 37 whish
states that a child should never be a subject to cruel, treatment and punishment.
According to this very article the offenders that are below eighteen years of age cannot
be sentenced to life in prison or become subjects to death penalty [5]. This convention
also states that a child that has committed a crime and is under 18 needs to go
through rehabilitation. The possibility for the child being rehabilitated is recognizes a
child being a human being and provides that possibility for the child to start his or her
life for new. Such rehabilitation gives the second chance for the child and his family,
because a child can change due to the fact that the development of the functions in
his brain has not stopped yet.
Each human being is born innocent and it is important not to forget that 2/3 of the
negative manifestations are acquired from the way parent bring their child up and the
childs social environment. If the child has only aggressive and violent examples in his
social environment, is not accepted and guided by his parents, not supported by his

teachers then the childs personality deforms. For instance it is obvious that if a child
is abusive he has a deficit of tactile contact and gentleness. These deformations may
have the harshest forms: emotional instability of the child, aggression, and violence
against other people. A juvenile is NOT an adult criminal and should never be treated
alike, and especially be a subject to death penalty. The death penalty is meant to
make criminals scared of committing serious crimes, but in reality this does not work
this exact way. It is more important to prevent children from committing crimes and to
remember that children do not commit crimes on the basis whether the crime in
accordance with the punishment for it put simply reflect what the family and the
society have put into his head.
5. Lionel Tates case
Lionel Tates case may without any doubt be called the most well known criminal case
of the beginning of the XXI century. Lionel Tate, a teenager was born 1987. At the age
of fourteen he was accused of a murder he committed when he was twelve years old,
for which he obtained a life-long sentence. The details of the case are the following: at
the age of twelve Lionel Tate killed Tiffany Eunick who was six years old. The girl was
Tates playmate. The details of the murder are awful the body of the girl has
numerous signs of brutality such as injuries one of which is the skull fracture. Lionel
Tate was only twelve years old when he committed this murder. It has been
announced that the boy was only copying the wrestling moves, but no matter what it
was the boy was imitating something that he has seen before either on TV or in real
life. The Court found the boy guilty and accused him of a first-degree murder. The
punishment for that is a life in prison.
The fact of giving a life sentence to a fourteen-year old shocked the society because
everybody understood that a child in his twelve years couldnt be judged as a mentally
developed adult. It was for the panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal that a new
trial was set in order to identify if Tate comprehended the proceedings held against
him. The competency of a fourteen-year-old child to stand the trial was very
questionable. The reveled the understanding that such a child cannot be mentally
capable of taking responsibility for his own actions. It is obvious that Lionel Tate has
committed a serious crime and the consequences of his actions are simply terrible
because the life of another child was taken away. None says that the boy should not
be punished, but not with death penalty or life in prison. The decision of home arrest
and probation is right for Lionel Tate. Lionel Tate deserves being punished but not
made to spend his whole lifetime in a prison for a crime he committed when he was
twelve years old and could not take full responsibility for his actions and completely
realize the consequences of his actions for the little girl and himself. That is the reason
this example should always be kept in mind by congressmen before they make
another juvenile lethal injection suggestion.
6. The case of Christopher Simmons
One of the most terrifying cases concerning the issue of juvenile death penalty is the
case of Christopher Simmons, a seventeen-year-old teenager who in 1993, when he
was seventeen years old broke into the house of his neighbor. The moment he got in
the house he met face to face with the owner of the house whose name is Shirley Ann
Crook, who was forty-six years old at the moment of the crime. To make sure that
Shirley Ann Crook will not recognize him the boy bound her with an electrical cord
and a duct tape, transported her in a car and threw her into the river of Meramec.
Shirley Ann Crook died from drowning. Mr. Simmons committed the whole crime with

a fifteen-year-old friend Charles Benjamin. As a consequence, Charles Benjamin was

sentences to life in prison, as he was not old enough for death penalty.
Correspondingly, Christopher Simmons was convicted and set for death penalty.
Lately the Supreme Court of Missouri brought up the Eights Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution that is against cruel and unusual punishments and another statement
was that Christopher Simmons was not old enough when he was 17 to take full
responsibility for his own actions. The majority of people would say that a seventeenyear-old boy must take full responsibility for his terrible crime, but people do forget
one essential thing. This boy truly was a CHILD when he committed a crime. A child
and no more than that. It is the problem of the contemporary society to start
considering children to be grown ups. The modern society creates the need for little
children to become mature faster, but the psychological and physiological cannot go
faster than the nature has set them. This issue is often forgotten. When a child is in
need of anything starting with attention and ending with a child having a stress
because of financial troubles he may step on the wrong path but is still not able to be
completely responsible for his actions. The artificial acceleration of the process of
growing up results in the growing number of juveniles all over the world, so killing will
not solve the problem, but only cover its consequences.
7.Conclusion
According to the Death Penalty Information Center 72 juveniles on death rows were
under 18 when they committed the crime they were accused for. It is twenty-nine for
Texas, fourteen for Alabama, five for Mississippi, four for Arizona, Louisiana and North
Carolina, three for Florida and South Caroline, two for Georgia and Pennsylvania and
one for Nevada and Virginia. Such states as Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Oklahoma,
Utah, Delaware and New Hampshire do allow juvenile execution but at the moment do
not have any juveniles on death row at the moment [6].
All these criminals were children under eighteen when their crimes were committed.
Being under eighteen great changes were happening in the brains and bodies making
this people emotionally instable. Other factors gave them the example of how the crime
can be committed but their inability to evaluate the consequences and the lack of
functionality of the decision-making process lead to a sad end. They all should be
punished, in order to firmly understand that committing crimes against other human
beings is immoral but their death is not best way out of the problem. Forgive them, for
they do not know what they are doing!
1 As of December 31, 2004, 71 persons were on death row for juvenile crimes. These
71 condemned juveniles constituted about 2% of the total death row population of
3,487. Although all were ages 16 or 17 at the time of their crimes, their current ages
range from 18 to 43. They were under death sentences in 12 different states and had
been on death row from 4 months to 24 years. Texas had by far the largest death row
for juvenile offenders, holding 29 (40%) of the national total of 72 juvenile
offenders[2].