Capital Punishment Practices on Race, Rights and American Child - Dissertation Example

At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was considered a global leader in child protection, child welfare, and juvenile justice reform, and many states around the world modeled their penal reform efforts after those in the United States. Yet by the century’s end, the United States had lost international esteem and was the object of widespread criticism over its failure to protect children’s rights. A centerpiece of the international debate was the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the principal international treaty for children’s rights and one to which every state in the international system is a party except the United States and Somalia. Particular attention focused on the US violation of Article 37§a, which outlaws both life imprisonment and the death penalty for children who commit their crimes when they are under 18 years of age.
Ultimately, the penalty was found to be unconstitutional in a 5-4 decision by the United States Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons (543 US 551 [2005]), a ruling that brought the United States into greater compliance with international norms about children and criminal justice. Although a great deal of attention has focused on the reasons the United States abolished the juvenile death penalty in the Roper decision, the continuation of the penalty throughout the 20th century is a puzzle given the clear conflict between the penalty and other norms about children that had already been internalized by the United States. Throughout most of the century, children in the United States were widely thought to be less culpable for their actions than adults; their decision-making abilities were believed to be compromised; and their crimes were thought to be a product of their environment. In many important ways, children were distinguished from adults in terms of access to vice (such as alcohol and cigarettes), military service, voting, and other markers of adulthood. Nonetheless, when children committed capital crimes in certain jurisdictions, they were made eligible for adult penalties, including the death penalty. Why did the United States continue a policy that was out of step not only with international opinion but also with other norms about children already internalized by the United States? What was distinct about these child criminals that excluded them from a steadily expanding set of protections for children? This research argues that the United States continued to execute juvenile offenders throughout the 20th century because of a unique combination of factors: the specific politics of American federalism, which limited centralized control over individual US states in terms of penalties for crimes within state jurisdiction, combined with a legacy of racial prejudice. The result was a penalty that was largely reserved for African-American juveniles convicted of violent crimes in the South. This research will begin with a summary of the interaction between the United States and the international children’s rights regime at the end of the 20th century. As the research will show, this relationship was a troubled one, marked by the consistent and escalating rebuke of the United States by the international community regarding the lack of recognition of and protection for children’s rights. The research will then briefly discuss the evolution of juvenile penal reform and rehabilitation in the United States in the 20th century.