The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the execution of children as young as sixteen is not ““cruel and unusual”” punishment. It has yet to make a definitive statement about children under sixteen. Of the thirty-eight states with the death penalty, fifteen have set the minimum age for death at 18, five set the minimum at seventeen, and seventeen have a minimum age of sixteen. The Federal Government sets the minimum age at eighteen (Dr. Geary, VCU CRJS). The following bullets are cases that lay the foundation of the death penalty today,

Two out of three children sent to death row are people of color. Historically, two out of three people executed for crimes they committed as children have been African-American. During this century, the ratio has jumped to three out of four. Of the nine girls executed in U.S. history, eight were Black and one was American Indian. The Federal Government has imposed the death penalty against American Indian children for crimes they committed as young as ten years old (The National coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty).

∙ In Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815 (1988), the United States Supreme Court held that executions of offenders age 15 and younger at the time of their crimes are prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The combined effect of the opinions by Justice Stevens and Justice O'Connor in Thompson is to hold that no state without a minimum age in their death penalty statute can go below age 16 without violating Thompson, and in fact no state with a minimum age in its death penalty statute uses an age less than 16.

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