Death Penalty for Cildren

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 Texas1 conducted 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-year-old 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.