Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court case that sanctioned the imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were at least 16 years of age at the time of the crime.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that neither Stanford or Wilkins asserted that the punishment was cruel or unusual at the time the Bill of Rights was adopted (common law at the time set the incapacity to commit a felony at age 14), and so both petitioners were left to argue that capital punishment for minors older than 14, was contrary to "the evolving standards of decency".

This expanse in the review of the Eighth Amendment was not granted in this decision, and Scalia went on to cite precedent limits set in Gregg v. Georgia (1976).

[2] We discern neither a historical nor a modern societal consensus forbidding the imposition of capital punishment on any person who murders at 16 or 17 years of age.

Justice O'Connor's opinion was not consistent with her prior holding in Thompson where she considered the laws of those states that categorically prohibited capital punishment as "objective indicia" of contemporary society's views.

The significance of this discrepancy is enormous; if Justice O'Connor would have included those fourteen states which prohibited capital punishment altogether, it is highly probable that she would have joined with the dissent, and therefore, in effect, reversed the decision of the Court.