Weighing the Death Penalty Ruling

What joy! On March 1, a date globally celebrated as International Death Penalty Abolition Day, the U.S. Supreme Court offered both the nation and the planet reason to celebrate. It abolished capital punishment for juveniles and effectively spared the lives of 72 condemned inmates incarcerated for homicides committed when they were less than 18 years old.

There is hope that the process will be completed and that the thousands of prisoners still under American sentences of death will not be left behind.

Though human rights advocates share this moment of sweet success, that sweetness remains laced with recognition of how much remains to be done. We look forward to a decision that would create a world execution-free at last.

Kay Bandell

Norwalk

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It’s good that young criminals are not going to be executed. But it would be better if we abolish the death penalty altogether. It’s wrong of Justice Antonin Scalia to dismiss the international opinion as a bunch of foreigners who have no right to interpret our Constitution. This is a human rights issue. We need to join all the civilized societies and abolish the death penalty.

Leonor Fontes

North Hollywood

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The Supreme Court deserves to be applauded for ruling that people who were under 18 at the time of their crimes cannot be executed. It’s a shame that such a ruling didn’t come years ago. The next civilized ruling by the Supreme Court should be against the prosecution of children as adults.

There has always been something cowardly in the prosecution of juveniles as adults. The cowardliness lies in the fact that prosecutors are routinely handed the convictions on a silver platter. In nearly every case in this country in which a child has been tried as an adult, the prosecution has had in its hands a confession or an incriminating statement.

Prosecutors didn’t have to work to convict them. Children tell on themselves. The younger the child, the more likely the confession.

Dale Jennings

Boulevard, Calif.

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The Supreme Court’s decision to bar the death sentence for killers under 18 is an incentive for gang members to commit murder and shows a total lack of sympathy for victims. If you are old enough to slaughter someone, you’re old enough to die for the crime.

Arthur Hansl

Santa Monica

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Michael Ramirez’s extreme right-wing treatment of the ruling against child execution (editorial cartoon, March 3) is not surprising, but that makes it no less disgusting or inappropriate. This kind thing has no place on the pages of any decent newspaper.

Robert Lunsford

Northridge