Capital punishment for juveniles in the United States

In the United States, capital punishment for juveniles existed until March 2, 2005, when the U . Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in Roper v. Simmons. Prior to Roper, there were 71 people on death row in the United States for crimes committed as juveniles. The last juvenile offender to be executed in the United States was 32-year-old Scott Hain in Oklahoma in 2003. The last female juvenile offender to be executed in the United States was Virginia Christian, who was executed in Virginia in 1912. The death penalty for juveniles in the United States was first applied in 1642. Before the 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling that instituted a death penalty moratorium nationwide, there were approximately 343 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. One of the juvenile offenders had received another death sentence for a separate murder committed at age 18, but was executed specifically for the murder he committed when was 17 since he exhausted his appeals in that case first. Prior to Roper, states had varying minimum ages for defendants to qualify for the death penalty; 19 states did not permit the execution of juveniles, while the remaining 19 retentionist states allowed juveniles as young as 16 or 17 at the time of their crime to be executed, albeit due to lengthy appeals processes, none of them were still juveniles by the time of their executions.