Punishment After The Punishment: How Deportation of Juvenile Offenders Violates the Eighth Amendment and International Law

Authors

Elizabeth Sethi

First Page

359

Abstract

This Comment examines how the United States deviates from most of the Western world by allowing deportation of noncitizen juvenile offenders to be essentially mandatory for a wide number of crimes. Deportation is “mandatory” in the sense that it is often an automatic result with very few options for judges to consider relevant mitigating factors, such as how long the noncitizen has lived in the United States, ties to U.S. citizen family members, or behavior since committing the crime. Deportation of juvenile offenders is applied harshly to both authorized and unauthorized noncitizens, many of whom have lived in the United States most of their lives.

This Comment uses the Supreme Court’s approaches to juvenile justice, the Eighth Amendment, and international law to show that deportation of juvenile offenders, absent judicial discretion, is a cruel and unusual punishment, and that it is time for the United States to significantly curtail deportation of noncitizens for crimes they committed as minors. Mandatory deportation of juvenile offenders not only conflicts with the rehabilitative purposes of juvenile justice but is also unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment as informed by international norms. International norms universally confirm mandatory deportation of juvenile offenders, without consideration of mitigating factors, is considered inhumane on the global stage.

Recommended Citation

Elizabeth Sethi, Punishment After The Punishment: How Deportation of Juvenile Offenders Violates the Eighth Amendment and International Law, 28 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 359 (2024).
Available at: https://lawcommons.lclark.edu/lclr/vol28/iss2/6