A Small Argument Against the US' Sentencing of Children to Life Without Parole

According to a paper published in 2008 at the University of San Francisco School of Law by Constance De la Vega and Michelle T. Leighton, the US is alone in the world in handing out Life Without Parole (LWOP) sentences to juveniles. The paper also argues "the LWOP sentence condemns a child to die in prison (and) is cruel and ineffective as a punishment." The United States is one of only two countries, the other country being Somalia, that has not ratified The United Nations "Convention of Human Rights of a Child" which states in article 37a:

 “No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age”

The case against the US continuing this practice is strong. There is the fact that, through the medium of the UN, almost all countries have agreed that children have a fundamental right not to be treated in this way. In of it’s self, this lends a huge amount of credibility to the argument. The US holds democracy in very high regard; it represents the very foundation of the nation. It may be because if this strong belief in the democratic process that the US holds it’s self as a moral leader of the world projecting an image of the freest and the fairest society. How is it then that every other developed democracy, not to mention governments that are not held in such high regard, have recognized that this practice is not in keeping with current human rights values. It is very hard to argue that the US is right and that the rest of the world is wrong.

            The legal mechanism that allows a child to be condemned to die in prison is that for a severe enough crime a child may be tried as an adult, thus exposing the child to adult punishments. This highlights a double standard in the US justice system. It follows that because a juvenile justice system exists in the US, it is recognized that juveniles need different treatment than do adults. We can assume that the motivations of the juvenile system are that children are easily influenced, prone to not thinking things through and not making as rational judgments as adults do. Thus they are not wholly responsible for their actions. It does not follow that because a child is accused of a particularly severe crime that they have somehow gained the thinking skills that we expect an adult to have.

            So, whilst the rest of the world has decided locking up children and throwing away the key is wrong, the US continues to carry out this adult punishment. Despite recognizing that children should be dealt with in a different way to adults, the US justice system seems to be of the belief that a child is thinking like an adult when he/she commits a certain crime. That then enables the child to be sentenced to what is arguably the worst punishment imaginable.