NEXT: Ruling on juvenile death penalty makes a mockery of justice

April 1 came a month early for the U.S. Supreme Court this year.

State legislators now get to make decisions for the Supreme Court, the court gets to oversee international treaties instead of Congress and the president, judicial precedent set only 15 years ago is now reversed (with one justice openly changing his mind), and juries are no longer trusted.

This all just in, thanks to a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling last month concluding that the death penalty for 16- or 17-year-old murderers is "cruel and unusual" and therefore violates the Constitution's Eighth Amendment.

But this is no April Fool's joke. This is the modern judiciary.

In 1989, the court decided that 16- and 17-year-olds could receive the death penalty. Now, 15 years later, it has changed its mind. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy supported the 1989 decision, but now has delivered the 2005 reversal.

Three dissenting justices called the decision a "mockery" and the catalyst for a judicial system that will "crown arbitrariness with chaos" — pointed words that were appropriate in this case.

Both the ruling's practical effects on our society and its constitutional implications should be examined here.

Murders by 17-year-olds can be just as horrific as those committed by adults.

There is Lee Boyd Malvo, the 17-year-old sidekick who joined John Allen Muhammad in a killing spree that put the nation's capital on edge for weeks in 2002.

There are others, too, like 17-year-old Kenneth Loggins who, under the influence of drugs and alcohol, joined some friends to pick up a hitchhiker in 1994 and repeatedly beat her, finally standing on her throat until she "gurgled blood" and died, according to the court. The group sexually assaulted her body and then threw it off a cliff, returning only to mutilate her body by stabbing and cutting it 180 times.

The horror of these grotesque murders is exactly what the death penalty is reserved for. But the Supreme Court decided that "an unacceptable likelihood exists that the brutality or cold-blooded nature of any particular crime would overpower" the jury's sense of justice when it comes to deciding if 16- or 17-year-olds should get the death penalty. So the court will play judge and jury for us — literally.

The court argues that — based on similar medical and scientific data it had in 1988 when it decided that 15-year-olds could not receive capital punishment — 16- and 17-year-olds are not as mature as 18-year-olds and therefore "have a greater claim than adults to be forgiven for failing to escape negative influences in their whole environment." The court simply and arbitrarily extended the cutoff age two years without any groundbreaking scientific data.

Ridiculously, the court said since juveniles "struggle to define their identity" and deal with peer pressure, they should be judged under less-strict standards.

I was 17 only a few years ago, and while peer pressure and "growing up" struggles existed, it's a stretch to say that therefore giving me the death penalty for crimes like Malvo's or Loggins' would be "cruel and unusual."

As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor argued in her dissent, it's reasonable to conclude that "at least some 17-year-old murderers are sufficiently mature to deserve the death penalty in an appropriate case." So why has the Supreme Court determined that it should decide for us?

The court argues that because 25 states allowed the death penalty for 17-year-olds in 1989, it correctly decided then that the United States had not come to a "national consensus" on banning the death penalty for juveniles. But 15 years later and after four more state legislatures decided to ban capital punishment for 17-year-olds, the nation seems to be turning its back on the practice. The court reasons that it can therefore rule the juvenile death penalty unconstitutional because of "evolving standards of decency" that help define the Eighth Amendment.

Confusingly, the court also argued that the United States should fall in line with international law and not set itself apart from the rest of the world by allowing the juvenile death penalty. But this is clearly an indication that America had not turned its back on the practice.

Regardless, a better alternative would be to let those evolving standards of decency evolve by themselves. Why not let the people decide what their decency standards are for each state? If America truly does come to a consensus that the juvenile death penalty should be banned, then state legislators will continue to nix it.

The Supreme Court obviously must uphold the Constitution, but it should interpret the Constitution narrowly or else it becomes the "sole arbiter of our nation's moral standards," as three dissenting justices argue it has already become.

Chris Collins is a senior at Whitworth College in Spokane. E-mail: NEXT@seattletimes.com