considered whether national sentiment had changed to the point where it would now be considered cruel 
and unusual punishment to apply the death penalty to juveniles. The Court first held that the Constitution 
prohibits executing a juvenile who was fifteen years of age or younger at the time he or she committed 
the capital crime. Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 825 (1988). One year later, the Court, in a 5-4 decision, 
held that a juvenile sixteen years or older at the time of the crime could be sentenced to death. Stanford v. 
Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361 (1989). Then, in Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), the Court said that the 
Constitution forbade the execution of anyone who was under eighteen at the time of their offense. The 
Simmons decision pointed to the decreasing frequency with which juvenile offenders were being sentenced 
to death as evidence of an emerging national consensus against capital punishment for juveniles. The Court 
noted that only 20 of the 37 death penalty states allowed juveniles to be executed, and since 1995, only 
three states had actually executed inmates for crimes they had committed as juveniles. 
Introduction to the American Criminal Justice System
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