Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1989

Stanford v. Kentucky

492 U.S. 361 | 109 S. Ct. 2969 | 106 L. Ed. 2d 306 | 1989 U.S. LEXIS 3195

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Takeaway

In short, Stanford held in 1989 that the Eighth Amendment did not categorically forbid executing 16- and 17-year-old murderers because the Court found no national consensus against the practice; the decision was later overruled by Roper v. Simmons.

Background

The Court consolidated two cases involving defendants sentenced to death for murders committed before they turned eighteen. Kevin Stanford was about 17 years and 4 months old when he participated in the robbery, sexual assault, and murder of a Kentucky gas-station attendant. A Kentucky juvenile court transferred him for adult prosecution after considering the gravity of the offenses, his prior delinquency, and the juvenile system’s limited prospects for rehabilitating him. A jury convicted Stanford and imposed a death sentence; the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed.

Heath Wilkins was about 16 years and 6 months old when he robbed and murdered a Missouri convenience-store owner. The Missouri juvenile court certified him for adult prosecution based on the violent offense, his maturity, his delinquent history, and the limited rehabilitative options available in juvenile court. Wilkins pleaded guilty, and the trial court imposed death after finding statutory aggravating circumstances. The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed.

The Supreme Court granted review to decide whether the Eighth Amendment categorically prohibits capital punishment for crimes committed at age 16 or 17.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Eighth Amendment categorically bars the death penalty for offenders who committed capital crimes at age 16 or 17.

Holding

No. The Court affirmed the death sentences, concluding that execution for a murder committed at age 16 or 17 was not then cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

Reasoning

The Court began with the Eighth Amendment’s original meaning and found no historical prohibition. At common law, the rebuttable presumption of incapacity for felony ended at age 14, and capital punishment was theoretically available for children over age 7. American history also included executions of offenders who committed crimes while under 18.

Because the challenged practice was not historically forbidden, the Court asked whether it violated the Amendment’s “evolving standards of decency.” The principal objective evidence of those standards was state legislation, to which the Court gave substantial deference under the federal system.

Among the 37 States then authorizing capital punishment, 15 excluded offenders who committed crimes at age 16 and 12 excluded those who committed crimes at age 17. A majority of death-penalty States therefore permitted capital punishment for offenders of petitioners’ ages. The Court found this pattern insufficient to establish the national consensus required to invalidate a punishment.

The comparatively small number of juvenile death sentences did not prove that juries and prosecutors viewed such sentences as categorically unacceptable. Juveniles commit a smaller share of capital crimes, and the Court thought it likely that juries were treating youth as a powerful mitigating consideration while still reserving death for what they regarded as exceptional cases. Rare use, in the Court’s view, did not establish categorical constitutional rejection.

Issue #2

Whether age limits in laws governing voting, drinking, driving, and similar activities show that 16- and 17-year-olds cannot constitutionally be sentenced to death.

Holding

No. The plurality held that those general age classifications did not establish that every person under 18 lacks sufficient moral responsibility for capital punishment.

Reasoning

The plurality reasoned that the capacity to understand that murder is profoundly wrong is not equivalent to the maturity required to vote wisely, drink responsibly, or drive safely. Thus, age limits in those settings did not directly answer the question of criminal responsibility for intentional murder.

More fundamentally, those laws make broad, administrable judgments about groups of people without individualized assessments. Capital sentencing, by contrast, requires individualized consideration, and a defendant’s age must be available as mitigating evidence.

Kentucky’s and Missouri’s juvenile-transfer procedures also required consideration of maturity, prior record, the seriousness of the crime, public safety, and prospects for rehabilitation before a juvenile could be tried as an adult. The plurality concluded that these individualized procedures were constitutionally adequate absent a societal consensus that no 16- or 17-year-old can ever be fully responsible for murder.

Issue #3

Whether the Eighth Amendment required the Court to independently find that juvenile executions were disproportionate or failed to serve deterrence and retribution, using social-science evidence, professional views, or foreign practices.

Holding

No, according to the Scalia plurality. It held that the Eighth Amendment inquiry turns on historically prohibited punishments and objectively demonstrated American societal consensus, not the Justices’ own policy or proportionality judgments.

Reasoning

The plurality declined to treat public-opinion polls, interest-group positions, professional-association views, or international practice as a sufficient basis for constitutional invalidation. A durable national consensus, it said, must appear in the operative acts of the American people: enacted laws and the application of those laws.

The plurality also rejected the claim that developmental research established that no juvenile is sufficiently morally responsible or susceptible to deterrence for execution. Such evidence might support legislative reform, but it could not demonstrate that every 16- or 17-year-old lacked responsibility or that the States’ contrary judgment was irrational.

In the plurality’s view, allowing judges to invalidate a punishment solely because they found it disproportionate or ineffective would turn the Court into a body of “philosopher-kings.” The Court’s role was to identify society’s evolved standards, not to substitute the Justices’ preferred standards for those reflected in American law.

Concurrences

Justice O'Connor

Reasoning

Justice O'Connor joined the Court's result, but justice O’Connor agreed that neither sentence should be set aside because there was no sufficiently clear national consensus against executing offenders who committed capital murder at age 16 or 17. Unlike the 15-year-old offender in Thompson v. Oklahoma, the petitioners had reached an age at which every legislature expressly setting a minimum age for capital punishment had set that threshold at 16 or above.

She also concluded that Missouri’s failure expressly to identify a minimum death-eligibility age was not constitutionally problematic under these circumstances. A majority of death-penalty States allowed capital punishment for crimes committed at age 16 or above, while Kentucky had expressly set 16 as its minimum age.

Justice O’Connor did not join the plurality’s rejection of proportionality analysis or its dismissal of noncapital age classifications. In her view, the Court retains an independent Eighth Amendment duty to assess the relationship between punishment and blameworthiness, and laws generally distinguishing juveniles from adults may be relevant to that inquiry. She concluded, however, that proportionality analysis did not resolve these particular cases.

Dissents

Justice Brennan

Reasoning

Justice Brennan, joined by Justices Marshall, Blackmun, and Stevens, would have held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits executing anyone for a crime committed before age 18. He argued that the plurality understated the evidence of a national consensus: 12 death-penalty States expressly barred execution below 18, 15 States and the District of Columbia had no operative death penalty, and three additional States barred execution below 17.

The dissent also regarded the actual use of juvenile death sentences as constitutionally significant. Such sentences were rare both absolutely and relative to the number of juvenile homicide arrests, showing that death for juvenile crimes was genuinely unusual rather than merely a penalty infrequently imposed on a small class of offenders.

Justice Brennan maintained that Eighth Amendment analysis cannot end with legislation and jury practice. The Court must ultimately exercise its own constitutional judgment about whether punishment is excessive; otherwise, political majorities would define the scope of the Bill of Rights that is supposed to restrain them.

On proportionality, the dissent concluded that juveniles as a class lack the maturity, experience, judgment, self-control, and independence that support the full moral responsibility expected of adults. The many legal rules treating persons under 18 differently from adults reflected that social understanding. Individualized transfer and sentencing decisions were inadequate because they did not reliably identify the rare juvenile whose culpability equaled that of an adult.

Finally, the dissent concluded that juvenile executions did not measurably advance retribution or deterrence. Reduced culpability undermined retribution, and adolescents’ impulsiveness, short-term thinking, and limited appreciation of death made the prospect of execution an insubstantial deterrent. The punishment was therefore excessive and constitutionally impermissible.