No Death to Juveniles

After what I initially thought was some consensus on the subject, I see that conservatives actually ARE very upset about the Supreme Court decision banning the death penalty for juveniles. Their argument mainly concerns Justice Anthony Kennedy looking outside the Constitution for his opinion. It's not surprising that constructionists on the conservative side would react at this with alarm.

I have done a little more reading on the subject, and would have to agree that Kennedy's opinion wasn't exactly cogent. It insisted that we not use the death penalty for minors based on three reasons: a "national consensus" on the matter (30 states disallow the practice); "world opinion" (we are the only country in the world that heretofore sanctioned the practice); and social/scientific studies that show juveniles to be not as capable of sound judgment as adults (recent studies have confirmed this hypothesis). The "world opinion" argument doesn't hold water; we have a lot of laws that other nations do not, many of which I wouldn't want to jettison (for example, illegal search and seizure laws, which aren't used in Britain). The "national consensus" argument probably requires a legislative solution rather than a judicial one; if there is an actual national consensus, then it shouldn't be so difficult to pass a law through Congress.

However, the social/scientific rationale seems to me sufficient. I would ask conservatives dismayed by the ruling this... do you feel the age of consent should be abolished? Seems to me that it's the same argument; that below a certain age, children should not be made
quite as culpable for their actions. I'm not arguing the end of imprisonment for juveniles. But I am saying that age should be a factor in determining culpability and punishment. We have consent laws because reasonable people feel that a 14 year-old, for example, can be coerced into sex without knowing what (s)he's doing. In other words, (s)he is not fully capable of
responsibility for his/her behavior.

I happen to feel that murdering citizens who commit crimes in and of itself rises to the standard of "cruel and unusual punishment" as written in the 8th Amendment. I'm not a supporter of Hammurabic "eye for an eye" arguments. And regardless of the moral/ethical concerns, the death penalty is an enormous tax burden. In California we spend $114 million PER YEAR on death penalty cases that we would not were there no death penalty (a lot of that has to
do with the molasses-like slowness of the wheels of justice here, but that does add safeguards which prevent the state from killing an innocent, unlike in the 11 Southern states which commit 90% of the country's executions).

That Kennedy did appear to stretch in his argument suggests that this issue is probably more well-suited to a legislative solution, as it has been administered in the states, or with a Constitutional Amendment. All the more reason why those of us who feel that the death penalty is cruel and unusual (in addition to being an ineffective deterrent and a money suck) should push for new laws overturning the practice.