Execution of juveniles weighed

WASHINGTON — A sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday weighed whether executing teenage murderers violates the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual" punishment.

Several justices voiced concern that the practice may alienate the United States from European countries that ban capital punishment.

The court's decision could decide the fate of 72 individuals currently on death row for crimes they committed as juveniles.

Seth Waxman, an attorney arguing on behalf of Christopher Simmons, a convicted killer who was sentenced to die in Missouri for a murder he committed at age 17, argued that a national consensus has emerged against the juvenile death penalty, just like the one against executing mentally retarded criminals. Simmons is now 28 years old.

"Our society has set the age of 18 for the line between adolescence and adulthood," said Waxman, who served as the government's chief advocate before the Supreme Court during the Clinton administration.

But James Layton, Missouri's state solicitor, argued that state legislatures, and not the courts, should decide at what age a murderer could be sentenced to the death penalty.

The high court last visited the issue of executing juveniles in 1989 when it upheld the penalty for killers who were 16 or 17 when they commit their crimes.

But the issue was given new life in 2002 when the court banned the execution of the mentally retarded, saying that in light of "evolving standards of decency," a national consensus had emerged against the practice.

In that decision, the court said the desire of juries to mete out what they view as an appropriate level of punishment for the most heinous crimes must be balanced against contemporary national attitudes about the death penalty.

The concept of evolving standards was established in a 1958 decision by then-Chief Justice Earl Warren who said the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment "must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

Simmons, convicted of first-degree murder in 1993 after kidnapping a neighbor and throwing her off a bridge, appealed his death sentence. He argued that, like the execution of the mentally retarded, a national consensus had emerged barring the execution of all juvenile offenders.