You are a Supreme Court Justice. Your research project is to write your opinion for the below hypothetical case:
A 20 year old man is found guilty of torturing and murdering three people in a one week period.
He is sentenced to death. His attorneys argue that sentencing someone to death who is under the age of 21 at the time of the crime is unconstitutional and a violation of the 8th Amendment. His attorneys are arguing that while Roper set the minimum age at 18, the Supreme Court should increase the age to 21.
The question: Is it cruel and unusual punishment to execute someone who is under the age of 21 at the time of the crime?
The requirements for the paper portion are below:
Your opinion must be 8-10 complete pages using 1″ margins and Times New Roman 12 point font. The cover page and reference page does not count towards the page number.
It needs to follow APA citation guidelines and have a cover page and a reference page (which do not count towards the page count).
You must cite and discuss at least 5 court cases. These cases need to be incorporated into your opinion to support your argument. At least 3 of these cases need to be cases we covered in class.
You must cite and dis‹-uss at least 3 research articles from peer reviewed scholarly journals.
At least 2 of these articles need to be from the past 5 years. These articles need to be incorporated into your opinion to support your argument.
You are to focus on legal, not emotional arguments. You want to support all points with your references.
