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.
Read more about List Of Juvenile Offenders Executed In The United States: List of Juvenile Offenders Executed in The United States Since 1976
Famous quotes containing the words list of, united states, list, juvenile, united and/or states:
“Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A sincere and steadfast co-operation in promoting such a reconstruction of our political system as would provide for the permanent liberty and happiness of the United States.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I never found even in my juvenile hours that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“... no young colored person in the United States today can truthfully offer as an excuse for lack of ambition or aspiration that members of his race have accomplished so little, he is discouraged from attempting anything himself. For there is scarcely a field of human endeavor which colored people have been allowed to enter in which there is not at least one worthy representative.”
—Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)