Celebrating 20 Years of PHR
Mobilizing Health Professionals to Speak Out Against the Juvenile Death Penalty
On March 1, 2005, the United States Supreme Court struck down the juvenile death penalty, putting an end to what child advocacy groups had long considered to be cruel and unusual—and therefore unconstitutional -- punishment. Marshalling the scientific expertise and clinical experience of health professionals across the country, Physicians for Human Rights' leadership played a critical role in abolishing the juvenile death penalty.
The Supreme Court ruling was the final outcome of a case that began in 1993, when a Missouri adolescent named Christopher Simmons, still only 17, murdered Shirley Crook and confessed to the crime. He was sentenced to death and sat on death row for nearly a decade. Then, in 2002, after the US Supreme Court ruling in Atkins v. Virginia overturned the death penalty for the mentally retarded, Simmons filed a petition with the Missouri Court, which then overturned its prior decision and sentenced Simmons to life imprisonment without parole. The state of Missouri appealed this decision, and the case found its way to the United States Supreme Court, thereby creating an opportunity to put an end to the death penalty for the nation's children once and for all.
In the months leading up to the decision, PHR released the Health Professionals' Call to Abolish the Juvenile Death Penalty, a statement that asserted, based on widespread scientific consensus, that minors "do not yet possess the maturity and mental capacities required to justify the imposition of the ultimate adult punishment." The Call was included in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court by PHR and other child welfare and youth advocacy organizations. It was endorsed by hundreds of leading child and adolescent psychiatrists and psychologists, neurologists, pediatricians and behavioral experts who powerfully and publicly registered their concern that the execution of juvenile offenders violates both common decency and established principles of international human rights.
The Call also highlighted the fact that the death penalty is almost always imposed on exceptionally impaired juvenile offenders who have been victimized by childhood sexual and physical abuse, head injury, brain dysfunction and mental illness, all of which inhibit adolescents' mental development.
Following the Supreme Court ruling, PHR Executive Director Leonard Rubenstein said: "We are thrilled about the decision. It provides a legal grounding for what scientists have shown—that kids are different from adults. Brains of young people are underdeveloped, particularly in the areas that dictate reason, impulse control and decision-making. To impose expectations of adult-level capacities on the thinking and behavior of minors has always been unreasonable, especially when the most severe adult punishment is at hand."
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