persecution of juveniles
...iding a definitive answer to the question of where we should set the age boundary for adult criminal responsibility. But executing juveniles puts the United States in rare company: The only other country that is still committed to the execution of juveniles is Iran. Until the data are in, we should join the rest of the world and prohibit the execution of people under the age of 18." Even among countries that impose the death penalty, the United States stands out as one of the few that execute juveniles and the mentally impaired. “Religious laws and social taboos spare these people in many countries where they practice the death penalty,” says Bernardine Dohrn, director of the Children & Family Justice Center at Chicago’s Northwestern University. “Here, there aren’t those constraints.” The practice has set America apart from most of the countries it shares a common legal heritage with and “practically, the whole world,” says Victor Streib, Dean of Pettit College of Law at Ohio Northern University. “The United States remains one of the only countries that hasn’t ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child simply because it bans capital punishment for juvenile offenses,” he says. “We stick out like a sore thumb.” Since 1985, the United States has executed 12 prisoners for crimes committed as juveniles. According to the most recent information available from Amnesty International, the rest of the world combined has put to death 21 juvenile offenders between 1985 and 1995, mostly in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. There are currently 70 death row inmates (all male) sentenced as juveniles, about 2 percent of the total death row in the United States. In the early 1990s, juvenile homicide increased substantially even as adult homicide fell, raising the cry for stiffer sentences. But even though the juvenile murder rate has dropped slightly in recent years, it is still 50 percent higher than it was in 1985, when the United States resumed executions for juvenile offenders, according to Streib. Drugs, Alcohol, Single Families … “Needless to say, they are overwhelmingly poor, overwhelmingly minorities,” Dohrn says, “and in one way or another, they suffered significantly in ...