Justices Agree to Study Ban on Youth Execution

The Supreme Court today agreed to consider banning the death penalty for all juvenile murderers, a day after issuing a decision that could end capital punishment for killers not yet 16 when they committed their crimes.

The justices said they will decide sometime next year whether use of the death penalty for anyone under 18 when the crime was committed violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The court voted to consider overturning the death sentences of Georgia Death Row inmate Jose Martinez High, who was 17 when he participated in a 1976 murder, and Missouri Death Row inmate Heath Wilkins, who was 16 when he committed a 1985 murder.

The court Wednesday overturned the death sentence of an Oklahoma man convicted of a murder committed when he was 15.

‘National Consensus’

Four of the eight justices who voted in that case said the death penalty for convicted murderers who committed their crimes before reaching 16 always amounts to unlawfully “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Three justices said no such age limitation on imposing capital punishment can be derived from the Constitution.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy did not participate in Wednesday’s ruling but will vote in the two cases decided next year.

In her controlling vote Wednesday, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor voiced serious doubts whether states may execute people for crimes committed when only 15.

“Although I believe that a national consensus forbidding the execution of any person for a crime committed before the age of 16 very likely does exist, I am reluctant to adopt this conclusion as a matter of constitutional law without better evidence than we now possess,” O’Connor said.

Points Left Unclear

But she supplied a fifth vote to overturn William Wayne Thompson’s death sentence, ruling that the state’s death penalty law could not be applied to him because it has no minimum age.

Wednesday’s ruling left unclear whether O’Connor would vote to strike down a death penalty law that explicitly made 15-year-old murderers eligible for execution.

The decision also left unclear whether the court would find fault with death penalty laws in which convicted killers who were 16 or 17 when they committed their crimes are eligible for execution.

Those questions could be answered when the court completes its study of the High and Wilkins appeals.