Capital Punishment: The Roper V. Simmons Case

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Recommended: Roper v. simmons, 543 u.s. 551

A case in which brought a huge amount of attention to capital punishment is the Roper v. Simmons case (Reuters, 2017). The Roper v. Simmons case included a teen named, Christopher Simmons, Simmons planned and committed a murder at the age of seventeen. He was convicted and sentenced the death penalty at the age of eighteen. Simmons petitioned after his conviction that he was under the age of eighteen at the time of the crime, therefore he was still a juvenile. He related back to the Atkins v Virginia case indicating he was under eighteen and not fully mentally developed yet. In the Atkins case the sentence was violating the eighth amendment valid to the states done by the fourteenth amendment, which states the prohibition of a mentally retarded

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