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MIRAH A. HOROWITZ [*] I INTRODUCTION Twenty years ago, sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer shocked the nation when she opened fire at Grover Cleveland Elementary, killing the principal and custodian, and wounding eight children. [1] In today's world, such horrifying school shootings have become almost commonplace. In 1997, two separate shooting rampages took the lives of seven students. The first occurred on October 1 in Pearl, Mississippi, when sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham killed his mother before killing three students and wounding seven others at his high school. [2] The second school shooting that year occurred on December 1 in West Paducah, Kentucky, when fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal killed three students at a morning high school prayer meeting. [3] In 1998, almost three times as many students lost their lives in school shootings. On March 24 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson and eleven-year-old Andrew Golden killed four schoolmates and a teacher after setting the fire alarm to draw their victims out into their l ine of fire. [4] On May 21 in Springfield, Oregon, fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel killed his parents and later opened fire in the school cafeteria, shooting twenty-four classmates, two fatally. [5] The largest, most frightening school massacre occurred on April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colorado, when Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, opened fire at Columbine High School, killing thirteen people before taking their own lives. [6] As these high profile events escalate, so do the thousands of less visible homicides that occur daily in inner cities and in poor, minority neighborhoods. Approximately twenty-three thousand homicides occur each year in the United States, roughly ten percent of which involve a perpetrator who is under eighteen years of age. Between the mid 1980s and the mid 1990s, the number of youths committing homicides had increased by 168%. [8] Juveniles currently account for one in six murder arrests (17%), [9] and the age of those juveniles gets younger and younger every year. For example, in North Carolina in 1997, seventy juveniles under eighteen years of age were arrested on murder charges. Thirty-five were seventeen, twenty-four were sixteen, seven were fifteen, and four were thirteen or fourteen. [10] In 1999, for the first time in North Carolina's history, two eleven-year-old twins were charged with the premeditated murder of their father as well as the attempted murder of their mother and sister." As a result of both the increase in the juvenile homicide rates and the increase in highly publicized school shootings, Americans are demanding harsher punishments for the juveniles that commit them. For example, "[i]n the days after the Jonesboro, Arkansas, shootings in March 1998, an opinion poll revealed that about half the adults in America believed that the two boys who shot their classmates should receive the death penalty." [12] Those boys were thirteen and eleven years of age. Facing strong, punishment-oriented constituencies, legislators and prosecutors are seeking to impose the death penalty on younger and younger offenders, both through the legislation they propose and the punishments they seek in trial. When seeking the death penalty for juveniles under the age of sixteen, these legislators and prosecutors do not seem to be concerned with the United States Supreme Court constitutional requirement that offenders be at least sixteen before they can be sentenced to death. [13] The issue of whether the imposition of the death penalty is constitutional under the cruel and unusual punishment prohibition of the United States Constitution has long been debated. On February 3, 1997, the American Bar Association ("ABA") called for a moratorium on the death penalty until serious flaws in its administration could be corrected. [14] Among the most serious problems cited was the Supreme Court's refusal to prohibit the execution of juvenile offenders under the age of eighteen. …

Kids Who Kill: A Critique of How the American Legal System Deals with Juveniles Who Commit Homicide