Aggravating Youth: Roper v Simmons and Age Discrimination

Roper v. Simmons: can juvenile offenders be executed?

In Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court was once again asked to determine if the execution of a juvenile, aged 16 or 17 years at the time of the offense, represents cruel and unusual punishment. In a five-to-four decision, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the Supreme Court of Missouri to overturn the death penalty of Christopher Simmons and held that the execution of juvenile...

Applying Roper v. Simmons in juvenile transfer and waiver proceedings: a legal and neuroscientific inquiry.

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court held the death penalty unconstitutional as applied to juveniles in Roper v. Simmons. The Court reasoned that juveniles were less criminally culpable than adults because they lack maturity, they are more vulnerable to peer influence, and their character is not as well formed as that of adults. Although Roper addressed the imposition of the ultimate punishment of d...

Too young to kill? U.S. Supreme Court treads a dangerous path in Roper v. Simmons.

The death penalty remains an intensely divisive topic in American society. Recently, there has been a series of cases, first involving defendants with mental retardation and more recently involving juveniles, in which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled by a five-to-four margin that the death penalty in both these classes violates the Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment...

A Slower Form of Death: Implications of Roper v. Simmons for Juveniles Sentenced to Life Without Parole

Keith Simmons

Computer scientists use formal verification to attempt to provide guarentees to the users of software about the run time characteristics of a given program. Verification techniques today often require a TCB or Trusted Code Base which due to time or effort constraints, the authors were not able to prove correct. When bugs occure in these pieces, they break down the strong guarentees of formal ve...