<P> Capital punishment for juveniles in the United States existed until March 1, 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court banned it in Roper v. Simmons . </P> <P> Since 1642, in the Thirteen Colonies, the United States under the Articles of Confederation, and the United States under the Constitution, an estimated 364 juvenile offenders have been put to death by the individual states (colonies, before 1776) and the federal government . </P> <P> The youngest person to be executed in the 20th century was George Stinney, electrocuted in South Carolina at the age of 14 on June 16, 1944 . The second youngest person to be executed in the 20th century was Fortune Ferguson in 1927 for rape in Florida . The youngest person ever to be sentenced to death in the United States was James Arcene, a Native American, for his role in a robbery and murder committed when he was ten years old . He was, however, 23 years old when he was actually executed on June 18, 1885 . The last execution of a juvenile was convicted murderer Leonard Shockley, who died in the Maryland gas chamber on April 10, 1959, at the age of 17 . No one has been under the age of 19 at the time of execution since at least 1964 . </P> <P> Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty did not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, 22 people have been executed for crimes committed while they were under the age of 18 . All of the 22 executed individuals were males . Twenty - one of them were age 17 when the crime occurred; one, Sean Sellers (executed on February 4, 1999, in Oklahoma), was 16 years old when he murdered his mother, stepfather, and a store clerk . </P>

When was the last juvenile executed in the us