US anti-death penalty campaigners say they are making dramatic progress toward banning executions for offences committed by juveniles, while the number of death sentences overall is declining.
David Elliot of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said Wyoming and South Dakota recently banned executions for crimes committed by people under the age of 18, bringing the number of states that prohibit executions for juvenile offenders to 19.
An additional 12 states do not use the death penalty against anyone.
The New Hampshire legislature was scheduled to decide on a ban next week and similar moves are also under way in Florida and Alabama.
The Supreme Court is expected to decide the issue in its upcoming term that starts in October.
"We are approaching critical mass," said Elliot. "We're encouraged by the fact that there is no organised opposition to this trend."
In 2002, the US Supreme Court banned the execution of people with mental retardation, overturning a 1989 decision. At that time, 30 states banned the execution of the mentally retarded and the majority on the court said a national consensus had emerged on the issue.
But University of Virginia Law professor Richard Bonnie said the issues were different since there had been considerable debate in several states when they instated their current death penalty statutes about whether to impose a minimum age of 18.
"Clearly there is momentum building towards excluding this type of executions but this issue is still very much contested in many parts of the country," said Bonnie.
An ABC-TV poll in December found only 21 percent of respondents in favour of imposing the death penalty on juveniles while 62 percent preferred life imprisonment without parole.
A Gallup Poll in October measured support for the death penalty in general at 64 percent - the lowest level since 1978.
A series of much-publicised cases of people convicted to die being exonerated by DNA or other evidence led then-Illinois Gov. George Ryan to suspend the death penalty in his state in 2000. The moratorium remains in effect.
Juries around the United States are handing down fewer death penalties, even though the number of homicides edged up slightly last year.
"In the late 1990s, we were seeing about 300 death penalties handed down each year. That's dropped to around 150. Prosecutors seem less likely to seek the death penalty and jurors less likely to impose it," Elliot said.
Bonnie said it remained to be seen whether this trend would last. "One can always anticipate there will be ebbs and flows in opinion but nobody can predict whether this will be a continuing pattern," he said.
The recent cases of convicted Washington snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo illustrate how opinion may have shifted.
Malvo, who was 17 at the time of the three-week shooting spree around Washington that killed 10 people in October 2002, received life without parole, even though the prosecution sought the death penalty. Muhammad, an adult, was sentenced to death after his murder conviction.
Officials from pro-death penalty organisations contacted by Reuters declined to comment on this issue.
There are currently 72 juveniles among 3,500 people on death rows around the nation. Slightly more than half the juvenile offenders are in Texas and Oklahoma and around two thirds are either black, Hispanic or Asian.
According to Amnesty International, the United States is one of only six countries with documented executions of child offenders since 1990, along with Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Yemen has since outlawed the practice.
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