Juvenile Death Penalty

Jeffrey Fagan at Columbia and Valerie West at NYU published "The Decline of the Juvenile Death Penalty: Scientific Evidence of Evolving Norms" forthcoming in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Their article "presents results of analyses of empirical data on the use of the death penalty for adolescent homicide offenders in state courts in the U.S. since 1990. The data show that, since 1994, when death sentences for juvenile offenders peaked, juvenile death sentences have declined significantly."  The paper, which was introduced into the record in the pending Supreme Court case of Roper v. Simmons, is available on line at http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=602621 [Jack Chin]