Juvenile Delinquency

Roper v. Simmons  543 U.S. 551 (2005)

Decided: Mar. 1, 2005

Vote:	5	(Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer)
	4	(Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, Thomas)

Opinion of the Court: Kennedy Concurring Opinion: Stevens (Ginsburg) Dissenting Opinion: O'Connor Dissenting Opinion: Scalia (Rehnquist, Thomas)

Roper, Superintendent, Potosi Correctional Center v. Simmons, decided by a 5-4 vote, March 1, 2005; Kennedy wrote the opinion; Scalia, Rehnquist, O’Connor, and Thomas dissented.

Christopher Simmons was sentenced to death by a St. Louis court for a gruesome murder that he helped commit in 1993 when he was seventeen. Ten years later, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the death sentence on the ground that executing a juvenile offender amounted to “cruel and unusual” punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

Lawyers for the state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had upheld the execution of older teenagers in a closely divided decision in 1989. In a change of course, however, the Court in 2005 used Simmons's case to prohibit the execution of juvenile offenders nationwide.

A majority of justices in the 5-4 decision said that juveniles were less culpable and less able to control their actions than adult offenders and that a “national consensus” had formed against executing juvenile offenders since the Court's previous ruling. The dissenting justices sharply criticized the ruling, saying it was based on little more than the “subjective” views of the majority.

Background. Capital punishment had been a divisive issue for the Court since the 1970s when it first threw out all existing death sentences in 1972 and then allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976 if juries were given guidelines for imposing the death penalty. Over the next two decades, the Court ruled out capital punishment in some specific types of cases—for example, rape—but rejected broader constitutional challenges.

Twice in the late 1980s, the Court considered the constitutionality of executing persons for offenses committed while under the age of eighteen. In  Thompson v. Oklahoma  (1988), a fractured 5-3 majority effectively forbade the execution of juvenile offenders under the age of sixteen. But one year later, the Court voted 5-4 in  Stanford v. Kentucky  to uphold capital punishment for defendants from Kentucky and Missouri who were sentenced to death for murders committed at the ages of seventeen and sixteen, respectively.

O’Connor cast the pivotal vote in both cases. She cited what she called a “national consensus” against execution of fifteen-year-olds and the absence of such a consensus against execution of older teenagers. O’Connor also wrote the Court's opinion in another 5-4 decision in 1989 that allowed execution of mentally retarded offenders ( Penry v. Lynaugh ).

The Court reversed itself on the mental retardation issue in 2002. With O’Connor and Kennedy in the majority, the Court held, 6-3, that execution of mentally retarded offenders amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Stevens's opinion in  Atkins v. Virginia  found a “national consensus” against the practice on the basis of the declining number of states that permitted it. In a footnote, Stevens also noted that execution of mentally retarded offenders was “overwhelmingly disapproved” in “the world community.” Dissenting justices criticized both bases for the decision.

When the Court reconvened in October 2002, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer signaled that they were similarly ready to bar execution of juvenile offenders. The four dissented from the Court's refusal to issue a writ of habeas corpus to overturn the death sentence imposed on Kevin Stanford, the Kentucky inmate in the 1989 decision. O’Connor and Kennedy were silent.

The Case. Christopher Simmons was a high school junior in the St. Louis suburb of Fenton in September 1993 when he and a fifteen-year-old friend murdered an elderly woman named Shirley Crook, who was apparently chosen at random, merely for the sake of the killing. The two youths used an unlocked window to gain access to Crook's home and then used duct tape to cover her eyes and mouth and bind her hands. They then used Crook's minivan to drive her to a railroad trestle spanning the Meramec River, where they tied her hands and feet together before throwing her off the bridge. Crook's body was recovered the next afternoon.

Evidence at his trial, which was conducted after Simmons had turned eighteen, showed that he had talked beforehand about committing a murder and had speculated to his friends that they could “get away with it” because they were minors. Simmons confessed to the killing when he was arrested the next day, and the defense presented no evidence during the guilt phase of the trial.

In the sentencing phase, Simmons's lawyer introduced evidence showing that the youth had no prior criminal record and had helped take care of his grandmother and his younger half-brothers. In the closing argument, Simmons's lawyer argued that his age was a mitigating factor. The prosecutor disagreed. “Seventeen years old?” the prosecutor said. “Isn’t that scary?”

The jury imposed the death penalty, which was affirmed on direct appeal through state courts and upheld again in a federal habeas corpus proceeding. After the Atkins decision, however, Simmons's lawyer raised the age issue again in a new habeas corpus petition in state court.

In a surprising decision, the Missouri Supreme Court in 2003 applied the new decision against executing mentally retarded offenders to rule, 4-3, that execution of juvenile offenders was also constitutionally prohibited. The majority justices pointed out that execution of juvenile offenders was relatively rare and the number of states allowing the practice had declined since the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling on the issue. They also noted that a large number of professional and religious groups had criticized the practice and that only two countries—Iran and the Congo—had executed juvenile offenders in the past few years.

The dissenting justices complained that the state supreme court had no authority to overrule a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The state cited that issue along with the main constitutional question in asking the Supreme Court to review the decision. The Court agreed to hear the case on January 26, 2004, and set the case for argument in October.

Arguments. Liberal and conservative justices made their opposing views in the case abundantly clear during oral arguments on October 13. But the pivotal justices, O’Connor and Kennedy, were harder to read. O’Connor asked only one question, while Kennedy's more active questioning suggested that he felt conflicted on the issue.

Missouri's state solicitor James Layton opened by urging the Court to reaffirm its 1989 ruling, which was rejected by the Missouri high court, and leave it to legislatures to set the minimum age for capital punishment and to juries to determine its use in individual cases. “There are 17-year-olds who are equally culpable” with older offenders, Layton said.

Ginsburg interrupted to note that eighteen was the minimum age for such things as buying tobacco. “Why should it be that someone is death-eligible under the age of eighteen but not eligible to be an adult member of the community?” she asked. Scalia questioned the reasoning. Why not exempt juveniles from all criminal laws? Scalia asked. “I don’t see where there's a logical line.”

In her sole question, O’Connor asked what weight to give to the number of states that permitted execution of juvenile offenders—about the same number, she said, as had allowed the death penalty for mentally retarded offenders before Atkins. Layton replied that in contrast to the situation in Atkins, there was no “inexorable trend” in the states against execution of older teens.

Later, Kennedy asked whether the U.S. position as one of the few countries to permit execution of juvenile offenders showed the practice to be “unusual.” Again, Layton demurred. The meaning of the Eighth Amendment, he said, “should not be based on what happens in the rest of the world.”

Representing Simmons, Seth Waxman, a former U.S. solicitor general, opened by arguing that a national consensus had emerged against executing juvenile offenders. In addition, he pointed to new scientific evidence about teenagers’ cognitive development that showed them to be less able to control their actions than adults and on that basis to be less morally culpable than adult offenders.

Rehnquist and Scalia challenged Waxman lightly as he began, then more forcefully later. “If all this is so clear, why can’t the legislature take it into account?” Scalia asked. Rehnquist questioned the failure to introduce the evidence in either the federal or state habeas corpus proceeding.

Kennedy also voiced doubts. Why couldn’t the juvenile's culpability be decided case by case, he asked. Breyer suggested an answer. A juvenile offender goes through “a lot of changing” before being brought to trial, Breyer said, because “their personality is not fully formed.” But Scalia objected. “If you have someone who commits a heinous crime and by the time he's brought to trial and convicted, he's come to Jesus, we don’t let him off,” Scalia said.

As Waxman neared the end of his time, Kennedy had one other concern. Would abolishing the death penalty for juvenile offenders mean that youth gangs would turn to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to carry out killings? he asked. In reply, Waxman returned to the evidence of juvenile offenders’ impulsiveness, saying the availability of the death penalty would have little deterrent effect.

Decision. Kennedy cast the decisive vote and wrote for the majority in the March 1 decision holding the death penalty to be a “disproportionate” punishment for juvenile offenders. Kennedy first cited “objective indicia of consensus” against the practice, including the small number of executions of juvenile offenders, as well as “the Court's own determination” of “the diminished culpability of juveniles” compared to adult offenders.

On the first issue, Kennedy noted that before the Missouri court's decision, thirty states barred the execution of juvenile offenders, including twelve with no death penalty and eighteen others that set the minimum age at eighteen. Even in the other twenty states, Kennedy said, the practice was “infrequent.” In the previous ten years, he said, only three states had executed juvenile offenders: Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia. Finally, Kennedy noted that the trend among the states was only in the direction of abolishing capital punishment for juveniles, with no state having voted in the previous fifteen years to reinstate it. On that basis, Kennedy concluded, there was “sufficient evidence” that society viewed juveniles as “categorically less culpable than the average criminal”—the same language used in Atkins to describe mentally retarded offenders.

On the second issue, Kennedy cited three factors as demonstrating that juveniles “cannot with reliability be classified among the worst offenders” and therefore made eligible for the death penalty. First, he said, “a lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility” among juveniles often result in “impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions.” Second, juveniles “are more vulnerable or susceptible to negative influences and outside pressures, including peer pressure.” Third, “the character of a juvenile is not as well formed as that of an adult.”

Recognition of those factors, Kennedy said, made it evident that the justifications for capital punishment—retribution and deterrence—“apply to [juveniles] with lesser force than to adults.” Retribution is “not proportional,” he said, if the penalty is imposed on someone whose culpability is diminished “by reason of youth and immaturity.” He also said that it was “unclear whether the death penalty has a significant or even measurable deterrent effect on juveniles.”

Kennedy rejected arguments that juries should be allowed to consider such factors on a case-by-case basis. “The differences between juvenile and adult offenders are too marked and well understood to risk allowing a youthful person to receive the death penalty despite insufficient culpability,” he wrote. He justified the age of eighteen as a dividing line because of its use in dividing childhood and adulthood in other contexts, such as voting.

In a final section, Kennedy also noted as “confirmation” what he called “the stark reality” that the United States was the only country to officially sanction the juvenile death penalty. Only seven countries had executed juvenile offenders since 1990: Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and China. “The United States now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the death penalty,” he said.

Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer joined Kennedy's opinion—the same four justices who had favored granting habeas corpus to Stanford, the death row inmate from the earlier case. Kennedy noted in his opinion that the governor of Kentucky had cited the Court's Atkins decision in late 2003 in commuting Stanford's sentence to life imprisonment.

In a sharply written dissent delivered from the bench, Scalia argued that the majority was wrong in discerning a consensus against executing juvenile offenders and in looking to international practice for guidance on the issue. He also criticized the majority for applying the Eighth Amendment based on what the Court in a 1958 opinion had called “the evolving standards of decency.”

“The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards—and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign court and legislatures,” Scalia wrote. “Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eighth Amendment . . . should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent.” Rehnquist and Thomas joined his opinion.

Dissenting separately, O’Connor said that states could reasonably conclude that “at least some 17-year-old murderers are sufficiently mature to deserve the death penalty” and that capital sentencing juries had not been shown to be “incapable of accurately assessing a youthful defendant's maturity or of giving due weight to the mitigating characteristics associated with youth.” She specifically noted, however, that she agreed with the majority's use of “evolving standards of decency” in Eighth Amendment cases. She also rejected Scalia's argument that foreign and international law have “no place” in Eighth Amendment cases.

Reaction. The ruling, affecting seventy-two inmates on death rows in twelve states, drew wide praise from groups opposed to the death penalty as well as such establishment organizations as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association. Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called the ruling “a victory for the American people.”

Pro-law enforcement groups complained about the decision, but in somewhat measured terms. “Why should five people get to judge morality for the entire country?” asked Charles Hobson, a lawyer with the California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. Public disapproval of the decision did not appear to be widespread or strong.

Dieter said the ruling indicated the justices would continue to closely scrutinize capital cases and might return to claims that the Court had previously treated as closed, such as racial discrimination. But current and former prosecutors cautioned against reading too much into the ruling. “It's not a harbinger of the end of the death penalty,” Joshua Marquis, co-chair of the capital litigation committee of the National District Attorneys Association, told the New York Times.

Simmons himself remained in prison under a life sentence without possibility of parole. Jefferson County prosecutor Bob Wilkins told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that his predecessor had been right to try the case as capital murder. “The facts of the case called for the death penalty,” he said. For her part, Elaine Wild, Crook's sister, told the newspaper she was dismayed by the decision. “I don’t think it's right,” she said. “This was a planned murder, not maybe to the point of it being Shirley, but somebody in that neighborhood.”