DPIC releases new report on “Immature Minds in a ​’Maturing Society’: Roper v. Simmons at 20″

The Death Penalty Information Center yesterday released this big new report about capital sentencing and execution trends for young people over the last two decades, with a particular attention focused on those aged 18 to 20.  (An overview of the report is available on this DPIC webpage.)  The full 75-page report, titled “Immature Minds in a ​’Maturing Society’: Roper v. Simmons at 20,” covers lots of ground, and here are parts of the report’s “Executive Summary”:

New death sentences for 18- to 20-year-olds have diminished both in absolute terms and as a percentage of all new death sentences over the last twenty years. During the past five years, juries have sentenced just five such individuals to death.

Seventy percent of 18- to 20-year-olds currently on death row were sentenced before Roper was decided.  Almost a third of 18- to 20-year-olds sentenced after Roper have been removed from death row because of judicial or executive action….

Since the Roper decision, more than three-quarters of the death sentences given to 18- to 20-year-olds have been imposed on people of color.  This is higher than the rate found in older defendants: half of the death sentences imposed on adults 21 and older were imposed on people of color during this same time frame.

California is an outlier. In the twenty years since Roper, nine out of ten death sentences given to 18- to 20-year-olds were imposed on people of color….

The average age at the time of crime for people sentenced to death is 34.3 for white people and 29.7 for people of color, a nearly five-year gap; the gap is as large as 15 years in some individual states.

Texas alone accounts for half of all executions of 18- to 20-year-olds since Roper — 80 percent of whom were people of color.