By Pamela Quanrud, Leah Roemer, Nina Motazedi, Anne Holsinger, Tiana Herring

In 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the United States Supreme Court held that the “Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments for­bid impo­si­tion of the death penal­ty on offend­ers who were under the age of eigh­teen when their crimes were com­mit­ted.” The deci­sion, after the exe­cu­tion of twen­ty-two peo­ple who com­mit­ted crimes under the age of 18 dur­ing the mod­ern death penal­ty era, marked the end of the juve­nile death penal­ty in the United States.

In Roper, Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on state trends in the treat­ment of young peo­ple, sci­en­tif­ic and med­ical stud­ies, and the peno­log­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions under­pin­ning cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment to sup­port the Court’s deci­sion that “today our soci­ety views juve­niles … as cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly less cul­pa­ble” than oth­er defen­dants. In doing so, Justice Kennedy acknowl­edged the inher­ent arbi­trari­ness in select­ing an age cut­off: “The qual­i­ties that dis­tin­guish juve­niles from adults do not dis­ap­pear when an indi­vid­ual turns 18,” he wrote, “[h]owever, a line must be drawn.”

Twenty years lat­er, the sci­en­tif­ic, pub­lic pol­i­cy, legal, and com­mon-sense ratio­nale that sup­port­ed the Roper deci­sion has become stronger in almost every respect — with one excep­tion. The Roper Court said age 18 was “the point where soci­ety draws the line for many pur­pos­es between child­hood and adult­hood.” Today, a grow­ing body of evi­dence now sug­gests that the line has been redrawn.

This report intro­duces new DPI analy­sis of the trends in sen­tenc­ing and exe­cu­tions of defen­dants age 18 to 20 based on twen­ty years of data, from the time of the Roper deci­sion on March 1, 2005 through the end of 2024.

Washington, DC: The Death Penalty Information Center, 2025. 75p.

By Craig Haney ;· Frank R. Baumgartner; · Karen Steele3   

In Roper v. Simmons (2005), the US Supreme Court raised the minimum age at which someone could be subjected to capital punishment, ruling that no one under the age of 18 at the time of their crime could be sentenced to death. The present article discusses the legal context and rationale by which the Court established the current age-based limit on death penalty eligibility as well as the scientific basis for a recent American Psychological Association Resolution that recommended extending that limit to include members of the “late adolescent class” (i.e., persons from 18 to 20 years old). In addition, we present new data that address the little-discussed but important racial/ethnic implications of these age-based limits to capital punishment, both for the already established Roper exclusion and the APA-proposed exclusion for the late adolescent class. In fact, a much higher percentage of persons in the late adolescent class who were sentenced to death in the post-Roper era were non-White, suggesting that their age-based exclusion would help to remedy this problematic pattern. 

 Journal of Pediatric Neuropsychology (2022) 8:168–177