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punishment could only be imposed on defendants who were at least 18 years old at the
time of their crimes. Here the court cited sociological and scientific evidence suggesting
that juveniles’ incomplete brain development mitigates their responsibility for their actions.
Despite this evidence, minors may still be tried as adults for certain crimes, and 41 states
allow life sentences without the possibility of parole for minors. In 2005, Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch found that at least 2,225 American children were
serving sentences of life without parole.7
Opinion polls have consistently found that a substantial majority of Americans want to
retain the death penalty. However, critics cite the abolition of the death penalty by other
democracies as evidence that prevailing moral standards now preclude execution as a
punishment.

Death penalty opponents also argue that courts are not able to determine guilt to the
degree of certitude that would justify execution. Between 1973 and 2005, 122 people in
25 states were released from death row after new evidence or new testing of old evidence
revealed that they were innocent of the crimes for which they had been sentenced.8 In
2006, Virginia Governor Mark Warner authorized the testing of DNA evidence in the case
of Roger Keith Coleman, who was executed by the state in 1992. The evidence confirmed
Coleman’s guilt, and indeed no other case of wrongful execution has ever been proven in
the United States. Nonetheless, the Coleman case may have set a precedent for the
posthumous testing of evidence in other capital cases, and opponents of the death penalty
say this could one day expose wrongful executions.
Some 42 percent of all death-row inmates are black men, and scholars have debated
whether this reflects discrimination. In the 1987 case McCleskey v. Kemp, convicted
murderer Warren McCleskey argued, ultimately without success, that Georgia’s use of the
death penalty constituted impermissible race discrimination under the Eighth and
Fourteenth Amendments. McCleskey relied on a study—led by University of Iowa professor
David Baldus—on capital sentencing in Georgia in the 1980s, which found that
prosecutors sought the death penalty in 70 percent of cases where a black defendant was
accused of murdering a white victim, but in only 15 percent of cases where a white
defendant was accused of murdering a black victim.9
In another study by Baldus and his colleagues, blacks in Philadelphia were found to be
sentenced to death at four times the rate of nonblack defendants convicted of similar
crimes. More than 89 percent of prisoners sent to death row in Philadelphia since 1976
have been people of color.10 Similar reports have found significant sentencing disparities
in other states. In Saldano v. Texas in 2000, the Supreme Court found that an expert
witness had recommended the death penalty to a jury based on a calculus that included
the defendant’s race; the court overturned the death sentence in that case.
However, other studies have shown that black defendants in capital cases are no more
likely to receive the death penalty than are whites. A 2004 article by John Blume,
Theodore Eisenberg, and Martin T. Well argued that because of the reluctance to impose
death sentences in cases of black-on-black crime, blacks convicted of murder are actually
less likely than white defendants to end up on death row.11 Similarly, after adjusting data
to account for the circumstances of each crime, such as level of brutality or premeditation,
a 2006 RAND Corporation study of 652 federal cases involving capital offenses found that
federal prosecutors were no more likely to seek the death penalty for black defendants
than for whites.12

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