Thompson v. Oklahoma

Appellant
William Wayne Thompson
Appellee
State of Oklahoma
Appellant's Claim
That Thompson was a child at the time of his crime and should not be subjected to the death penalty.
Chief Lawyer for Appellant
Harry F. Tepker Jr.
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
David W. Lee, Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General
Justices for the Court
Harry A. Blackmun, William J. Brennan, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Sandra Day O'Connor, John Paul Stevens (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
William H. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Byron R. White (Anthony M. Kennedy didnot participate)
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
29 June 1988
Decision
The Oklahoma Court's death sentence against Thompson was overturned and the case was remanded.
Significance
The decision established a national standard recognizing that sentencing defendants under 16 years old to death constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment"which is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
A Question of Age
In 1983, when he was 15 years old, Wayne Thompson helped to kidnap and kill his abusive brother-in-law, Charles Keene, who had repeatedly beaten Thompson's sister and other members of their family. Thompson's own life would later be spared in a Supreme Court decision which recognized that both society and the law are works in progress.
Grady County prosecutors charged four suspects with Keene's murder--Thompson,his half-brother Tony Mann, and two friends, Richard Jones and Bobby Glass.The state decided to try the cases separately. Before the 15-year-old Thompson could be tried as an adult, however, the prosecution had to prove the prospective merits of the case and convince a district court that there was no reasonable hope of his rehabilitation. A psychiatric examination found that Thompson was mentally competent to stand trial. Police records showed violent behavior in Thompson's past, including arrests for crimes ranging from shoplifting to assault. Prosecutors successfully convinced the court that he should betried as an adult.
Keene's murder had been especially gruesome. He had been abducted and savagely beaten. His throat and abdomen had been slashed, he had been shot twice, and his body had been weighted with a concrete block before his killers dumpedthe body into a river. The prosecution introduced three grisly color photographs of Keene's corpse during the trial, after which Thompson was found guilty. In Oklahoma's justice system, trials to determine guilt are separate from asubsequent phase to determine sentencing. Before the death penalty can be applied, a state statute requires proof that "aggravating circumstances" were involved in a capital crime. During the sentencing phase, the prosecution reintroduced the graphic photographs to demonstrate the cruel nature of the murder. The jury agreed that Keene's murder met the criteria for the death penalty. Like his three accomplices, Thompson was sentenced to die (Glass was laterkilled in prison, while Jones' conviction was overturned).
Thompson's lawyers appealed the sentence. Oklahoma law held that because Thompson had met the criteria to be tried as an adult, he was eligible to be punished as one. The appeals court accepted Thompson's contention that reintroducing two of the graphic crime photographs during the sentencing phase of the trial was a prejudicial prosecution tactic. In light of the amount of other evidence against him, however, the court found that the jury would have passedthe death sentence regardless of whether or not they had seen the inflammatory photographs. The appeal was rejected.
The Consensus of Society
Thompson's subsequent appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court on 9 November 1987. Briefs were filed in support of the appeal by representatives of the ChildWelfare League of America and the International Human Rights Law Group. Attorney Generals of 20 states supported Oklahoma with a brief asking that the judgement against Thompson be affirmed. The state of Oklahoma continued to insist that Thompson had met the criteria to be tried as an adult and should be punished as one, but this time Thompson's attorney's arguments were successful. On 29 June 1988, the Court vacated Thompson's death sentence and remanded his case back to Oklahoma's courts.
The Court's five-vote majority agreed that Thompson's sentence was inappropriate, but their reasoning varied. Justices Stevens, Marshall, Brennan, and Blackmun looked to state laws for a reflection of society's views on the issue.In the written opinion, Justice Stevens quoted the 1958 Trop v. Dullesdecision, in which the Court looked for guidance to "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." Stevens noted that 18 states had set the age of 16 as the minimum age for imposition of the death penalty. Furthermore, he noted that most Western societies and even some totalitarian states like the Soviet Union forbid the execution of juveniles.
Justice O'Connor agreed in a separate opinion that Thompson should not be executed, but disputed that his particular case should prove the existence of any national consensus on imposing the death sentence on minors. Although 18 state legislatures had barred seeking the death penalty against juveniles and another 14 states had completely dispensed with capital punishment, O'Connor pointed out that the federal government and 19 other states set no rules regarding age in statutes accepting death as a legitimate penalty.
Nevertheless, O'Connor accepted that a national consensus on the minimum ageissue "very likely" did exist. Furthermore, O'Connor wrote that the absence of a minimum age statute in Oklahoma law showed a lack of necessary care and deliberation had been taken in drafting state statutes relating to the EighthAmendment. She noted that laws authorizing capital punishment and providing that minors could be tried as adults had been passed separately by the Oklahoma legislature, as if no serious consideration had been given to the effect one law might have upon the other. Since Oklahoma lawmakers had apparently failed to consider such a possible interrelationship, O'Connor deferred to the "national consensus" that defendants under 16 should not be executed.
Justices Scalia, White, and Rehnquist rejected the idea that a consensus existed on the minimum age issue. In their dissent, Scalia wrote that the Court should not involve itself in setting a precedent in the minimum age issue unless the national consensus and the lack of judgemental maturity in juveniles alluded to by the majority could be established beyond any doubt in every case. Scalia wrote that the Eighth Amendment was not written to ban the executionof juveniles. In the majority opinion, Justice Stevens had cited statisticsshowing that no defendant under 16 had been executed in the U.S. in forty years and that juries had sentenced fewer than two dozen minors to death in thetwentieth century. To Stevens, this implied a national consensus. To Scalia and the dissenters, it implied that juries took such cases so seriously that the death penalty was meted out to minors only when it was deserved.
The Thompson decision was a landmark in ongoing controversies over thedeath penalty and the administration of justice to youthful offenders. In 1997, Amnesty International listed the United States as one of only five nations, including Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, which allow the execution of prisoners under the age of 18.
Related Cases

• Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958).
  
• Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).
  
• Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976).
  
• Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302 (1989).
  
• Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361 (1989).

Amnesty International on Capital Punishment
According to its own statement of purpose, Amnesty International (AI), sometimes called simply "Amnesty," is "a worldwide campaigning movement that worksto promote all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards." Among its campaigns are effortsto free "prisoners of conscience" or political prisoners; fair trials for all political prisoners; and abolition of the death penalty.
Amnesty opposes capital punishment for a number of reasons, holding that it is "cruel, inhuman and degrading," and violates the right to life; that innocent people can be killed, and since it is irrevocable, there can be no correction of the error; that it does not deter crime to any greater degree than other forms of punishment; that by committing an execution, the state is in effect sponsoring violence; and that capital punishment is often used as a weaponagainst minority groups and those opposed to the government.
The group reports that in 1996, more than 4,200 prisoners were executed worldwide, a staggering proportion of which--3,500--were killed in China. (And those are only the executions that have been reported.) China, the Ukraine, theRussian Federation, and Iran accounted for 92 percent of all executions in 1996. On the other hand, 25 countries have abolished the death penalty.
Sources
Amnesty International, http://www.amnesty.org.