Optimists should be heartened by last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling outlawing capital punishment for juveniles, which noted this country's ''evolving sense of decency'' on the issue of executing minors. That's good news. But an ''evolving sense of decency'' means that the death penalty itself, relic of a more bestial, less enlightened past, no longer has a place here or anywhere else.
The court, by a single vote, decided a case challenging the constitutionality of executing people who committed their crimes at 16 or 17. The majority recognized that on this issue, America has been both isolated and hypocritical compared with other nations. ''It is fair to say that the United States now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile death penalty,'' Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.
According to Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, 226 juveniles have been sentenced to death since 1976. Last week's ruling spared 72 remaining on Death Row, and forced prosecutors to rethink pending cases, including those against Lee Malvo, who as a teen joined John Muhammad in a D.C.-area shooting spree. Muhammad was sentenced to die, but Malvo got life in Virginia; Louisiana and Alabama prosecutors were weighing capital charges against him.
The issue, though, isn't whether to execute or free Malvo, or the man whose case the high court decided, Christopher Simmons, who at 17 killed a woman in Missouri. Long terms, even with no parole, are fine with me in the most heinous cases.
For those methodically working against the death penalty and for more reasonable solutions, it's ''Where do we go from here?'' A few years ago the Supreme Court banned executions of the mentally retarded. What about the mentally ill? Some 10 percent of those on U.S. Death Rows suffer from severe mental illness, and up to a dozen are executed each year, says David Elliott, of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
There is also a need to revisit the issue of racial disparities in the meting out of death sentences, and to address the competency of lawyers for many defendants who end up on Death Row.
The main path to abolition of the death penalty, however, runs through the statehouses. As ''favorable as this ruling was, the center of gravity has shifted from the Supreme Court to the state legislatures,'' Elliott says.
I am optimistic that in my lifetime, the day will arrive when that ''evolving sense of decency'' means complete elimination of capital punishment.
©2005 New York Daily News
