TITLE:
The Practice of US Execution of Juvenile Delinquents in Dated Times Vis-À-Vis International Human Rights Laws and Case Laws
AUTHORS:
Nuruye Beyan Feleke
KEYWORDS:
Juvenile, Prohibition, Delinquents, Execution
JOURNAL NAME:
Beijing Law Review,
Vol.6 No.4,
December
31,
2015
ABSTRACT: The prohibition
against the death penalty as applied to juveniles is widely practiced across
the globe. The United Nations treaties have prescribed age requirements for
extreme sentences such as the juvenile death penalty. Despite these
requirements very few countries continue to sentence juveniles to the death
penalty that ignore the age of the offender. The United States leads the world
in state-sanctioned juvenile executions. However, recently the United States
came into compliance with international norms and heralded a major shift by banning the death penalty as applied
to juveniles in the Supreme Court case of Roper v. Simmons in 2005. Due to that, the
overwhelming majority of states do not sentence juveniles to the death penalty
and the prohibition against sentencing children to die has become accepted. On
the contrary, for over three centuries, the United States executed juvenile
delinquents and the Supreme Court, for a long time, held there was no national
consensus rejecting juvenile executions and not a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The US is already a party to a number of fundamental human rights treaties that
impact capital punishment. To some extent, the US has isolated itself from the
most direct effects of these treaties through reservations or by invoking
domestic law. But the US is committed to the underlying human rights principles
of these treaties and these instruments can serve as a starting point for
reforming and restricting the death penalty from a human rights perspective.