WASHINGTON — A new report from the Death Penalty Information Center highlights a continuing decline in the use of capital punishment for people who were ages 18 to 20 at the time of their offenses, underscoring shifting legal and societal views on youth and culpability.
In April 2025, the Death Penalty Information Center released Immature Minds in a “Maturing Society”: Roper v. Simmons at 20, a report examining evidence suggesting that 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds may be as deserving as those under 18 of exclusion from death penalty eligibility.
The report highlights the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case Roper v. Simmons, the decision that ended the juvenile death penalty in the United States. The case addressed the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, barring the death penalty for people who were under age 18 when their crimes were committed.
The report included an analysis of trends in sentencing and executions of people ages 18 to 20, based on data from March 1, 2005, through 2024. The organization has now incorporated data from 2025 into the report and updated its findings.
According to the report, new death sentences for individuals in this age group in 2025 declined both in number and as a proportion of total death sentences, continuing a 20-year downward trend. Similarly, executions of people who were ages 18 to 20 at the time of the crime have continued to decrease since 2005.
The organization states that in 2025, new death sentences for individuals in this age range at the time of the offense continued to decline both in number and as a percentage of all new death sentences from the previous year.
The report found that only one of the 23 individuals sentenced to death in 2025 was in this age group, two fewer than in 2024. It further notes that juries sentenced five individuals in this age range to death between 2021 and 2025, accounting for 4.6% of the 109 new death sentences imposed during that period.
The report also found that death sentences for young people are geographically concentrated, with Florida identified as “the only state to impose a death sentence on a person 18, 19, or 20 at the time of the crime, Donovan Faison.” Faison, who was 20 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to death for murdering his pregnant girlfriend in 2022.
The report notes a downward trend in the geographic concentration of death sentences, with 21 states imposing such sentences on young people from 2005 to 2009, compared with only four states as of 2025.
It further states that “72% (13/18) of executions over the past five years (2021 to 2025) of individuals aged 18 to 20 at the time of their crime took place in three states: Texas (6/18), Oklahoma (4/18) and Alabama (3/18),” with nearly half of all executions of people in this cohort since 2005 occurring in Texas.
Additionally, the report states that “50 of the 63 young people in this age group who were executed in Texas were people of color.”
The report highlights the execution of Jessie Hoffman at age 46, who was 18 at the time of his offense. The execution took place March 18, 2025, in Louisiana, marking the state’s first execution in 15 years and its first using nitrogen gas.
Cecelia Koppel, one of Hoffman’s attorneys and director of the Center for Social Justice at Loyola University College of Law, said, “He was a father, a husband, and a man who showed extraordinary capacity for redemption. Jessie no longer bore any resemblance to the 18-year-old who killed Molly Elliot.”
The report notes that if Hoffman had been three months younger at the time of the crime, he would not have been eligible for the death penalty. In Roper, the Supreme Court recognized that “juveniles are less capable of capital crimes because their brains have not fully developed.”
Hoffman’s attorneys described his childhood as marked by “sexual, physical, and verbal abuse, and other torture and violence.” They noted the psychological and physical harm he experienced from both parents.
Caroline Tillman, one of Hoffman’s defense attorneys, called his nearly three decades in prison a period of transformation and proof “that people can change.” She described him as having deep remorse, a determination to make amends, and being a source of strength and guidance to those around him.
Additionally, Tillman said he “built a family inside those walls — not just with the men who served alongside him, but with the officers and staff who came to know him over decades[.]”
Follow the Vanguard on Social Media – X, Instagram and Facebook. Subscribe the Vanguard News letters. To make a tax-deductible donation, please visit davisvanguard.org/donate or give directly through ActBlue. Your support will ensure that the vital work of the Vanguard continues.
