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Young Murderers
| Article
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16966 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1990 |
927 Words |
| Author
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Ernest van den Haag
Ernest van den Haag, recently retired as John M. Olin
Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham
University, is currently a distinguished scholar at the
Heritage Foundation. This is a revised version of a paper
first read in January 1990 at a conference on "The Ambiguous
Legacy of the Enlightenment" held at the Claremont Institute
in Claremont, California, to be published in a forthcoming
book. |
A majority of Americans - more than 70 percent according to polls - favor the death penalty for murderers. However, many judges, lawyers (execution reduces the pool of clients) and, above all, law professors oppose it. Unable to persuade the voters, they tried for many years to get the Supreme Court to declare the death penalty unconstitutional. The court refused, but it did prohibit the execution of persons who were under sixteen when they murdered.
Abolitionists now want to raise the minimum age to eighteen - a two-year difference. (Some want to raise the age still further.) Abolitionists obviously want to apply the death penalty to as few murderers as possible. Yet most murders are committed by very young people. Immunizing them against the death penalty means that they will be able to murder again in prison and out; further, the group most inclined to murder - male youths -would not be threatened with the most severe penalty. People mature earlier now than they did in the past; yet we hold them accountable for their actions later, if at all. This hardly makes sense.
Obviously a small child may not understand the effect of his acts and, therefore, not intend them. A child also may not be able to tell right from wrong or understand that any act is morally and legally wrong. For either reason, children below the age of reason are not held criminally responsible, although they are usually subject to minor punishment by parents and teachers. As children grow, they learn. A sixteen-year-old, unless severely retarded, knows that shooting can kill the victim and that murder is regarded as morally and legally wrong. He understands what he is doing when he murders and that it is wrong; that understanding does not begin on his eighteenth birthday. (I think understanding on the average begins before sixteen, but the Supreme Court has drawn a line that other courts cannot disregard.) To be sure, some juvenile murderers, although aware of the wrongness of their act, may not have a very deep understanding of it; or they may be impulsive or emotionally immature. So may older murderers. That is why juries weigh all relevant factors before deciding whether capital punishment is appropriate or not.
Each case is different. While some juvenile murderers are quite immature, others are quite mature. Our criminal justice system accommodates these differences. In capital trials, upon conviction, the jury weighs the mitigating and aggravating factors in a separate proceeding. It can impose the death penalty only if it finds that the murder was particularly heinous and that the aggravating factors outweigh the
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