Stanford v. Kentucky

Stanford v. Kentucky
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 7, 1989 Decided June 26, 1989
Full case name	Kevin Stanford v. State of Kentucky (No. 87-5765); together with Heath Wilkins v. State of Missouri (No. 87-6026)
Citations	492 U.S. 361 (more) 109 S. Ct. 2969; 106 L. Ed. 2d 306; 1989 U.S. LEXIS 3195
Case history
Prior	Stanford v. Commonwealth, 734 S.W.2d 781 (Ky. 1987); cert. granted, 488 U.S. 887 (1988); State v. Wilkins, 736 S.W.2d 409 (Mo. 1987); cert. granted, 487 U.S. 1233 (1988).
Holding
The judgments are affirmed. The imposition of capital punishment on an individual for a crime committed at 16 or 17 years of age does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy
Case opinions
Majority	Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, White, O'Connor, Kennedy (parts I, II, III, and IV-A)
Plurality	Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, White, Kennedy (parts IV-B and V)
Concurrence	O'Connor (in part and in judgment)
Dissent	Brennan, joined by Marshall, Blackmun, Stevens
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amends. VIII, XIV
Overruled by
Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005)

Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court case that sanctioned the imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were at least 16 years of age at the time of the crime.^[1] This decision came one year after Thompson v. Oklahoma, in which the Court had held that a 15-year-old offender could not be executed because to do so would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. In 2003, the Governor of Kentucky Paul E. Patton commuted the death sentence of Kevin Stanford, an action followed by the Supreme Court two years later in Roper v. Simmons overruling Stanford and holding that all juvenile offenders are exempt from the death penalty.