Juvenile Death Penalty Today: Present Death Row Inmates Under Juvenile Death Sentences and Death Sentences and Executions for Juvenile Crimes, January 1, 1973, to December 31, 1994

• NCJ Number: 153514
• Author(s): V L Streib
• Date Published: 1995
• Length: 19 pages
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/; NCJRS Photocopy Services; Cleveland State University
• Publication Type: Statistics
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This paper documents 22 years of juvenile death sentencing under modern death penalty statutes in the United States.

Abstract

While the sentencing to death of juvenile offenders has been fairly consistent over the past two decades, the actual execution of such offenders has been much more sporadic. In the past decade arrests of juveniles (including some as young as thirteen) have risen about 17 percent, causing some observers of this wave of juvenile homicide to claim that the death penalty for juvenile offenders is or should be the American people's solution of choice. However, the data compiled in this report suggest that a juvenile arrested for homicide today is no more likely to be sentenced to death than in the past. The spiraling number of arrests of juveniles for potentially capital crimes has not resulted in a comparable rise in juvenile death sentencing or a rise in the number of juvenile offenders on death row. It should also be noted that both the annual juvenile death sentencing rate and the juvenile death row population remain very small compared to that for adults, each being between 1 percent and 2 percent of the totals. Footnotes, tables, appendixes