Roper v. Simmons Understood Kids Are Different, Paving the way for a more humane approach to sentencing young people
Today is the 20th anniversary of Roper v Simmons, a groundbreaking United States Supreme Court decision that ushered in a new framework for analyzing children’s rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. Roper banned the death penalty for youth who were convicted of murder before they turned 18. Reversing its own decision just 16 years earlier in Stanford v Kentucky upholding the death penalty for 16- and 17-year-olds, the Court relied on scientific research clearly showing critical developmental differences between adolescents and adults that made youth less blameworthy for their criminal conduct, including even the most serious crimes.
Indeed, the decision might never have happened absent the scientific research developed and disseminated by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. Established in 1996, the network formed to consider how developmental traits associated with adolescence bore on the culpability, capacity and competency of this young cohort. Initial research tying the developmental immaturity of teens to reduced culpability for their criminal conduct began circulating in the academic and advocacy communities in the early 2000’s. Advocates presented this research to the Supreme Court through several amicus briefs filed on behalf of medical, psychiatric and psychological professional associations. Juvenile Law Center organized an amicus effort on behalf of dozens of advocacy organizations arguing that the law should take adolescent development into account when considering culpability under the Eighth Amendment.
To further bolster the argument against the juvenile death penalty, a coalition of advocates and researchers also worked intensely throughout the Spring and Summer of 2004 to secure legislative victories prohibiting the execution of young people under 18. These legislative bans demonstrated to the Court that the death penalty for young people violated the “evolving standards of decency” test under the Eighth Amendment, which generally requires a majority of states to ban a particular sentence in order to show a growing national consensus against it. By the time the case was heard by the Court, more than half the states prohibited the execution of children — a critical threshold.
Despite some recent paring of the numbers of individuals incarcerated in the United States, we remain the world leader in locking people up. With a criminal justice system hyper-focused on retribution and incapacitation, our sentences overall are especially harsh as compared to our global neighbors. On the heels of the “super-predator” myth of the 1990’s — the false claim that we were facing a generation of teen predators who would terrorize our communities as we entered the 21st century — the numbers of young people tried and sentenced as adults swelled, as did their numbers in our prisons and on death row. Roper was the first in a series of Supreme Court decisions that aimed to reverse this trend, laying the foundation for the several decisions that followed, including Graham v Florida, which struck down life without parole sentences categorically for youth convicted of non-homicide crimes, and Miller v Alabama, which banned mandatory life without parole sentences for youth convicted of murder.
For imprisoned people in America, our justice system can be crushing, meting out decades-long sentences that far exceed the time needed for their rehabilitation and successful reintegration into their communities. For adults, the Eighth Amendment offers little hope of a reprieve. The bar to overcome the Amendment’s proscription is exceedingly low, the tolerance for cruelty exceedingly high. While nearly every other country examines cruelty through a human rights framework that centers human dignity, the United States has declined to endorse these principles. Developmental research and neuroscience have provided children, their advocates, and the Court with a tool to alter that calculus.
At the time Roper was decided, around 70 people sentenced to death for homicide crimes committed as children were incarcerated on death rows across the country. Following Roper, their sentences were commuted to life without parole. When the Court limited the imposition of life without parole seven years later in Miller, these individuals were among the 2000 prisoners formerly sentenced to die in prison as children who became eligible to be resentenced. Today, approximately 1800 of these people have been resentenced and over 1100 have come home, including those initially given the death penalty. Many are working for advocacy organizations, working with youth or involved in other community groups. Lost family connections have been restored, new families have been created. Since these people began coming home 13 years ago, very few have reentered the criminal justice system. While our Constitution lacks any recognition of the human dignity of every individual, these formerly incarcerated individuals have demonstrated their right to reclaim that core value. Stripped of hope for decades, they now provide the rest of us with hope for a better way.
