Capital Punishment

10 Pages 2578 Words

ack to almost the beginning of our country. In 1642, Thomas Graunger of Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, was the first juvenile, to be sentenced to death and executed in our country for a crime that he committed (Executions, 2000). Since the start of capital punishment (or the recording thereof) in 1608, there have been around 19,200 executions in the United States of all ages. Of that total number, experts believe approximately 356 of them were juvenile executions, meaning that the crime that the individual was sentenced for took place before the offender was eighteen years of age (Gonnerman, 2000). This accounts for about 1.8% of all executions from the start of capital punishment to present (Executions, 2000). Since 1973 there has been 196 death sentences handed out to juveniles and seventeen of those have ended in actual execution (Streib, 2000). Table 1 lists those seventeen individuals that have been executed since 1973, their date and place of execution, their race, and their age both when they committed their crime and when they were executed.
The juvenile justice system was born in 1899 at which time it was recognized as separate from the regular justice system that dealt with adult offenders (Ricotta, 1988). At the start, the stated objectives of the juvenile justice system was “...to provide measures of guidance and rehabilitation for the child and protection for society, not to fix criminal responsibility, guilt, and punishment” (Ricotta, 1988). By the stated objectives it would seem as though rehabilitation would be one of the most important goals of the juvenile system. So how are we able to decide now that a teenager is past the point of rehabilitation and deserves the final punishment? Or does the obligation to “protect society” become more overwhelming and leave us with no other option but to put someone to death? These are just a few questions that one might ask about our present goals in comparison to the ini...