Source: “Oregon Law Students Gather at the United States District Courthouse.” School of Law, 12 Dec. 2019.
The federal government, by not addressing the legality of capital punishment for minors, even as various states changed their own stances on the matter, served as a barrier towards evolving standards of decency.
"In 1989, the Supreme Court answered this very question...But in what ways has the court changed over the past 15 years? "
-NPR, "Analysis: Arguments for and against juvenile death penalty," October 2004
"Its [the death penalty's] use against some classes of defendants, obviously, has come to strike people as cruel or inhumane in a way that it hadn't as recently as 15 years ago."
-NPR, "Analysis: Arguments for and against juvenile death penalty," October 2004
"The United States is the only industrialized nation and one of the few in the world to apply the death penalty to youthful offenders."
-NPR, "Analysis: Arguments for and against juvenile death penalty," October 2004
Prison Policy Initiative, Peter Wagner, 2004
Death Penalty Information Center, "An evolving national consensus against the juvenile death penalty", 2004
"The number of states that either have no capital punishment or do not allow it for offenders under 18 had reached 30..."
-Washington Post, "Justice's switch alters death penalty," March 2005
"We discern neither a historical nor a modern societal consensus forbidding the imposition of capital punishment on any person who murders at 16 or 17 years of age. Accordingly, we conclude that such punishment does not offend the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
The judgments of the Supreme Court of Kentucky and the Supreme Court of Missouri are therefore affirmed"
-Justice Antonin Scalia, opinion of the Court
"It held that since Stanford, 'a national consensus has developed against the execution of juvenile offenders, as demonstrated by the fact that eighteen states now bar such executions for juveniles, that twelve other states bar executions altogether, that no state has lowered its age of execution below 18 since Stanford, that five states have legislatively or by case law raised or established the minimum age at 18, and that the imposition of the juvenile death penalty has become truly unusual over the last decade.'"
-Justice Anthony Kennedy, opinion of the Court
Philidelphia Daily News, Signe Wilkinson, 2005