Still Sweet 16

The U.S. is one of a handful of nations that permit the death penalty for offenders who committed crimes before the age of 18. Only three juvenile killers have been executed since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, but 29 remain on death row. This term, the court was expected to settle the question of whether the Constitution forbids such executions by considering the case of William Wayne Thompson, 21, an Oklahoma inmate who was 15 when he helped murder his former brother-in-law.

When the decision came down last week, however, the result was less clear cut. Four Justices -- Blackmun, Brennan, Marshall and Stevens -- ruled that the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids capital punishment for any offenders who committed their crimes before reaching 16. Three others -- Rehnquist, Scalia and White -- said the Constitution posed no such barrier. Justice Kennedy did not participate.

The decisive vote came from Justice O'Connor, who ruled narrowly that Oklahoma could not carry out such executions because the state had never specified a minimum age in its death-penalty law. O'Connor stopped short of ruling on whether juvenile executions would be constitutional even in states that expressly permit them. That saved Thompson, but it left the larger issue at a standstill. The court has promised to review the question next year when it considers the cases of two other inmates on death row for crimes committed as juveniles.