Capital punishment law could be in for a change, as the Supreme Court set a July 2005 deadline to determine whether they would reaffirm or abolish the death penalty for juvenile offenders. The court announced Monday that the justices would hear an appeal of the Missouri Supreme Court ruling on the execution of convicted murderer Christopher Simmons.

The Missouri Supreme Court said their ruling, which deemed the execution of Simmons would be “cruel and unusual punishment,” was made based on the constitutional reasoning behind the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling banning the execution of mentally retarded offenders.

Capital punishment laws for juveniles prohibit the execution of killers younger than 16, and while capital punishment can be recommended for juveniles between 16 or 17 years old, it is rarely invoked.

According to The Washington Post’s article, “A Death Penalty Revisited,” “The basic argument against the death penalty for murderers younger than 18 is that they, like the moderately mentally retarded, may be held accountable for their actions – but lack the emotional and intellectual maturity to qualify for a penalty society reserves for its most blameworthy wrongdoers.”

To modify that argument, as no offenders under the age of 16 can be sentenced with capital punishment, the statement is reduced to including only 16- and 17-year-olds.

As the law stands now, no juvenile can be sentenced with the death penalty unless tried as an adult – if tried as a juvenile, a killer, at most, can be sent to a juvenile correctional facility until age 21, and after that a judge may review the case for further sentencing. Also, to warrant the death penalty, juries must prove a murder or murders were pre-meditated.

In 1993 Simmons, whose case sparked this hearing, and an accomplice “broke into the Fenton, Mo., home of Shirley Crook … then bound her with tape, electrical wire and the belt from her bathrobe and pushed her off a railroad bridge to drown,” according to The Associated Press.

While a crime such as this is evidence of a deranged and cruel mind, it does show one trait: intellectual maturity. The acts of breaking into a home, binding a person with multiple constrictive media and throwing a human being off a bridge are not actions performed by an undeveloped mind. It is highly doubtful that the one-year gap between juvenile status and adult status would have been sufficient to change Simmons from a cold-blooded killer to a model, upstanding citizen. While circumstances may have changed in that one year, it is almost impossible that the incidents creating his then-present mindset would have changed enough to make him realize the wrong in killing a person.

Even without extending support either for or against the death penalty itself, a stance should be taken on the rationality of excluding 16- and 17-year-olds from any possibility of capital punishment. And the stance is there is no rationality behind the exclusion. Through legal processes and juries, it is almost impossible to get to the point where a juvenile has been tried as an adult and proved to pre-meditate a murder, and at that point, a juvenile should be regarded as having adult capabilities and frame of mind. Abolishing juvenile capital punishment would merely be lessening the penalty for murder based on the developmental gap of one or two years which, while the brain is in a small state of flux, is not the major period of time during which a person learns the difference between right and wrong. The Supreme Court needs to realize this and uphold their previous rulings.