Some of what follows from certain ideas about capital punishment might never need to be confronted except as truths which would only be applied in a very limited circumstances. All the same, whether one will ever see those circumstances, it is still true that these things follow from certain concepts whether people like them or not. While it is rare to hear of children committing acts the Bible or American law classify as capital offenses, it follows that it is logically impossible for someone to deserve lenience for such actions on the basis of mere age--or harshness on the basis of age. Only a consistent moral framework has even the possibility of being true, and treating someone who commits certain behaviors more leniently or severely because of how old they are is inherently inconsistent.
Conceptual consistency does not mean that an idea or system is true, but inconsistency inevitably means an idea is false. Moreover, the very concept of justice entails that a just action is not made unjust by unpleasant or arbitrary circumstances. Children are often assumed to have a natural lack of intelligence, competence, foresight, and moral concern that does not at all follow from their age. Children, like adults, are individuals that can develop these characteristics and look to reason rather than slide into apathy or a lifetime of blind philosophical ignorance. Nothing about being "old" or "young" (which are merely comparative terms as it is) dictates these traits in an ultimate sense, just as gender and race do not dictate these traits whatsoever.
Punishing adult men and women more harshly than teenagers or those who are even younger for the same crimes is nothing but arbitrary mercy encoded into a legal system or into social norms. Reason and justice demand consistency; if a penalty truly is just because a specific act merits it, then factors like gender, race, and age cannot change the nature of an offense or its deserved response. If murder (not that murder is the height of malicious or sinful behavior in the first place) deserves death, then this is as true when an 11 year-old commits murder as it is when a 50 year-old commits murder. If rape deserves death, it does not matter if a rapist is 15, 31, or any other age; the person guilty of rape deserves to have his or her life extinguished.
To treat those of an older age as if they deserve to receive harsher penalties even belittles both the old and the young in addition to being inherently irrational. When it comes to adults, this practice encourages the infliction of a subjective degree of additional harshness. Adults are merely assumed to deserve greater penalties for acts like kidnapping, murder, or rape, meaning they are treated more harshly because of their age--a clear example of discrimination based on an unchosen part of their basic identity. When it comes to children, this practice perpetuates the false notion that teenagers and those younger than 13 are almost automatically incapable of intellectual and moral maturity, as if most adults display those qualities anyway (a basic conversation with many adults reveals the thoroughly assumption-based and philosophically unexamined nature of their lives).
There is even more that can be said when the issue is explored within the context of Biblical theology. In saying that someone who murders, kidnaps, or rapes (to name just three key examples) should be executed, the Bible does not insist that children and teenagers are exempt from such punishments due to their youth. It simply says to kill anyone who commits such deeds. There are no provisions for lesser or greater penalties for sins that genuinely have the Biblical status of crimes because the sins themselves remain the same no matter who carries them out. Just as logical truths are not different for children and adults, any existing moral dimensions to certain behaviors like murder or rape would not be different for children and adults. Only emotionalism and cultural norms convince some people otherwise.
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