Capital punishment for juveniles in the United States

In the United States, capital punishment for juveniles existed until March 2, 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in Roper v. Simmons.

Before the 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling that instituted a death penalty moratorium nationwide, there were approximately 342 executions of juveniles in the United States.

In the years following the 1976 Gregg v. Georgia ruling that overturned Furman and upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, there were 22 executions of juvenile offenders before the practice was outlawed.

He weighed only 65 pounds, leading contemporary death penalty researcher M. Watt Espy to posit that Persons was likely closer to 12 than he was to 15.

The third youngest person to be executed in the 20th century was Fortune Ferguson in 1927 for rape in Florida; he allegedly committed the crime when he was 13 years old.

[9] The last judicially-approved execution of a juvenile was convicted murderer Leonard Shockley, who died in a Maryland gas chamber on April 10, 1959, at the age of 17.

Twenty-one of them were age 17 when the crime occurred; one, Sean Sellers (executed on February 4, 1999, in Oklahoma), was 16 years old when he murdered his mother, stepfather, and a store clerk.

In Thompson v. Oklahoma (1988), the Supreme Court first held unconstitutional imposition of the death penalty for crime committed aged 15 or younger.