For Immediate Release: Contact: AIUSA Press Office
July 19, 2004 (202) 544-0200 x 302Amnesty International, Other Nobel Peace Laureates Jointly File
Amicus CuriaeBrief Urging End to the Juvenile Death Penalty

(Washington, DC) – Today, former Nobel Peace prize winner Amnesty International and fifteen other Nobel Peace laureates jointly filed an amicus curiae brief to the United States Supreme Court urging an end to the execution of juvenile offenders. The country's leading child advocacy groups, medical associations, legal organizations, and faith communities joined with them in filing friend of the court briefs in the case of Roper versus Simmons, which will determine the constitutionality of the juvenile death penalty.

While customary international law explicitly prohibits the execution of juvenile offenders, the United States is the only country in the world that proclaims its legal right to do so. Since 1998, the United States has executed 13 juvenile offenders while the entire rest of the world carried out 8 such executions. The briefs filed in this case highlight the distinctiveness of children as a protected class and focus on issues ranging from adolescent cognitive development to the treatment of minors within international human right law.

"When it comes to the juvenile death penalty, the US justice system stands in sorry isolation from the international community," said Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA (AIUSA). "While we pay lip service to the rhetoric of protecting our children, our enthusiasm for executing the young is unparalleled and is considered shameful by the rest of the world."

In October 2004, the case of Roper v. Simmons will allow the US Supreme Court to weigh the constitutionality of executing individuals who were under age eighteen at the time of the crime. "The Simmons case will be an opportunity for the US to conform to international human rights standards and to genuinely honor the obligations that we have to protect the rights of our children," said Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn, Director of AIUSA's Program to Abolish the Death Penalty.

"With almost total unanimity among the international community that state-sponsored execution of children is unconscionable and unlawful, it is time for this human rights tragedy to end once and for all," concluded Schulz.

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