For example, a man about 5 years ago was set free after he was in jail for 12 years and after he was 72 hours from being executed. In his case, the prosecutors used perjured testimony and suppressed evidence, which imprisoned him. The witness that set him free was a sixteen year old who while imprisoned for a separate murder conviction, confessed to killing the officer whom Randall Adams was in jail for killing ("The Case"1). For us to kill those people who have acted outside the boundaries of acceptable human behavior puts us in the same position-we become killers. Executions give society the unmistakable message that human life no longer deserves respect; they are also irrevocable and can be inflicted upon the innocent. Why did the U.S. Supreme Court change their minds about the Death Penalty? In 1972, the Supreme Court declared that under then existing laws "the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty.constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the eighth and Fourteenth Amendments" This was found to be "constitutionally unacceptable." Then in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is not unconstitutional. "The court ruled that these new statutes contained "objective standards to guide, regularize, and make rationally review able the process for imposing the sentence of death.".
This leads us to another question, what do we do with juvenile delinquents? The notion of separate treatment for children under criminal law goes back to a very early English law. Children under seven years of age were legally incapable of committing a crime, and children between seven and fourteen were presumed incapable, this concept being based upon a child's inability to have a guilty mind, or mensrea. Thus, from almost the beginning children have been treated differently from adults who commit the same acts. .
The function of the juvenile court system is to take a somewhat fatherly and protective attitude toward children, whether to offer humanitarian assistance or parental punishment.
