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Transcript

Roper v. Simmons

What happened?

Christopher Simmons was convicted of capital murder.

Capital murder is and aggravated assault that ends in murder, causing the murderer to be eligible to recieve the death penalty

What happened to cause the case?

Christopher Simmons and one other friend broke in Mrs Shirley Crook's house on the night of September 9, 1993. They had planned to break into her house, take items, and kill Mrs. Crook. They ended up restraining her arms and legs, putting a towel over her head, and throwing her over a bridge into a river.

The jury was never really told about his social history.

He was taken to a bar at a very young age and given alcohol by his father to amuse his father's friends. When he was a teenager, he smoked marijuana very often, drank hard liquor and used LSD and "magic mushrooms," which contain toxins that induce hallucinogenic effects. His neighbor, a 28 year old man that lived in a mobile home, provided him and other neighborhood children with a shelter and different kinds of drugs. Simmons often visited when his father's abuse became particularly bad. The man would also encourage the boys to commit crimes so they would split the proceeds.

Supreme Court Decision

Original Decision

The SCOTUS trial

In Christopher's original 1993 trial, he was sentenced to death. The evidence was overwhelming. There were many people bearing witness that he had bragged about murdering Shirley Crook. He reenacted the murder on video in the trial.

A series of appeals to higher state and federal courts were repetitively denied, but eventually it made it to the Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decisions, the court ruled in favor of Simmons, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

The Supreme Court's Opinion

Justice Kennedy presented the opinion, basically stating that the execution of minors falls under the category of "cruel and unusual punishment."

Significance of the Case

What cases influenced this one?

Atkins vs. Virginia, because it was a case involving the execution of a mentally retarded person, and the court saw a similarity between that and the execution of a minor.

The precedent it established:

After working its way up through the court system with every court ruling that Simmons deserved the death penalty, the decision was overturned by the supreme court. The supreme court ruled, "The death penalty for a minor, that was not yet able to understand his own humanity, was in fact cruel and unusual." It then set a precedent stating that if you could prove that the defendant could not yet understand his own humanity, he was not eligible for maximum punishment.

What it was about:

The case brought about the questions whether sentencing a 17 year old to death for committing murder was cruel and unusual, and whether it was okay for a lower court to come to a different decision based on if the death penalty was, "cruel and unusual."

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