List of Juvenile Offenders Executed in The United States

This is a list of juvenile offenders executed in the United States. This list consists of those people executed in the United States for crimes committed while they were juveniles (before reaching the age of majority). Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, 22 people have been executed for crimes committed while they were under the age of 18. All of the 22 executed individuals were males. Twenty-one of them were age 17 when the crime occurred; one, Sean Sellers (executed on February 4, 1999, in Oklahoma), was 16 years old when he murdered his mother, stepfather, and a store clerk.

Since 1642, (in the Thirteen Colonies, the United States under the Articles of Confederation, and the current United States), an estimated 364 juvenile offenders have been put to death by states and the federal government. Twenty-two of those executions occurred after 1976. Due to the slow process of appeals since 1976, it has been highly unusual for a condemned person to actually be under the age of 18 at the time of execution. The youngest person to be executed in the 20th century was George Stinney, electrocuted in South Carolina at the age of fourteen on June 16, 1944. The youngest person ever to be sentenced to death in the United States was James Arcene, a Native American, for his role in a robbery and murder committed when he was ten years old. He was, however, 23-years-old when he was actually executed on June 18, 1885. The last execution of a juvenile may have been convicted murderer Leonard Shockley, who died in the Maryland gas chamber on April 10, 1959, at the age of 17. No one has been under the age of 19 at the time of execution since at least 1964.

After the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), the minimum age at time of crime to be subject to the death penalty is 18, thereby ending execution as a punishment for juvenile offenders. At the time of the Roper v. Simmons decision, there were 71 juvenile offenders awaiting execution on death row: 13 in Alabama; four in Arizona; three in Florida; two in Georgia; four in Louisiana; five in Mississippi; one in Nevada; four in North Carolina; two in Pennsylvania; three in South Carolina; 29 in Texas; and one in Virginia. Detailed summaries of each of these offenders can be found here.