From the Mouths of Babes

What is it that makes America exceptional? Love of freedom? Enduring respect for individual rights? The spirit of entrepreneurialism? The ardency of generations of utopian dreamers?

Try this: until Tuesday, America was the only nation in the world with a functioning government that allowed the execution of those under 18.

This salient fact was observed by Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which went into force in 2002 and forbade the execution of juveniles, has been signed by every nation in the world except the U.S. and Somalia. Somalia is in a state of anarchy. The U.N. is not normally a place for bandwagoning; given the vast number of countries that exist, there are dozens of cultural perspectives on the place of capital punishment in society. That representatives of each of these viewpoints could come to similar conclusions is prima facie evidence of a moral fact.

Moreover, our understanding of the nature of children and their level of responsibility for their actions has changed drastically over the past decades. Adolescents are fragile, growing things that have neither been genetically or socially fully integrated into their environment. It was partially a scientific evolution and the support of the American Psychological Association (APA) that allowed the Court to decide as it did. The logic of Atkins v. Virginia, a 2002 case which established that poor reasoning and impulse control precludes the execution of the retarded, comes into play here; although adolescents will one day be fully functional adults, until that day they are a riotous mess of chemicals and brain-size fluctuations. Recent research on the maturation of the brain, available only with modern technology, clearly shows that there is some basis in fact that the ultimate punishment should never be meted out for youthful mistakes, however egregious.

Justice Antonin Scalia deigned to write a dissenting opinion in which he called the decision a “mockery,” claiming that this decision somehow contradicted Alexander Hamilton’s assertion that the judiciary has “merely judgment,” as opposed to a will of its own. Scalia did not deign to explain why Hamilton—or, more exactly, Hamilton’s political propaganda—is more pertinent to the U.S. Constitution than a majority of current Justices, nor how, exactly, the Court might have violated this dictum in the first place. Scalia’s opinions are often galling, but even we can see that such shenanigans as insisting that the APA’s about-face in the last decade is a sign of “conflicting [scientific] opinions” is neither legally nor morally sound.

It is fortunate, by this decision, that the U.S. has taken 72 young offenders off the chopping block and that no one will be placed on death row for his or her offenses as a minor (so long as the Supreme Court does not revisit this decision). This shows that the U.S., against the odds, is still tiptoeing down the road towards moral progress—the road that the civilized world has been traveling for centuries. But this is not enough. The state-sponsored murder of the irresponsible is execrable, but the state-sponsored murder of calculating adults isn’t saintly, either. America must move to abolish the death penalty.

It may take years, it may take decades, but until Americans realize that life in prison is the most just punishment for heinous crimes, all of our citizens are living under a cloud of blame. The state was born in an environment of tyranny, repression, exploitation, and bloodshed, and America still has not dropped one relic of this murky past. Where the rack, the ownership of persons, genocide, and the strategic killing of civilian populations have all been abandoned as means towards achieving the ends of the state, the death penalty remains.

Killing people is wrong, according to most ethical and religious traditions, regardless of who the victim is. The criminal justice system has an awful record of convicting the innocent of capital crimes, and this only in cases where enough evidence exists to reach a real conclusion; no one will ever know how many innocent people have been executed in the U.S. And for those with a penchant for cost-benefit analysis, the death penalty is incredibly expensive. Studies have shown time and again that the difference between the costs of a death row case and the cost of life in prison are enormous.

America: the land where execution is not only legal, but a luxury. It doesn’t matter how it gets done, or which reasons are found most compelling, but we must join the rest of the civilized world in banning the death penalty. Not executing those who commit crimes as teenagers is a good step—but we must go further.