Lonnie Bassett is personable, chatty and looks like an average teenager.

But he's not average at all: According to Phoenix police reports, he confessed to shooting two people in the head with a .12-gauge shotgun in June.

Now, as he approaches his 17th birthday, he faces two counts of first-degree murder. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

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But a pending decision in the U.S. Supreme Court could change the sentence he receives. And it could change the future of four other young Arizonans on death row and two more whose death sentences are being reconsidered by state courts.

At issue in the Supreme Court is whether the "evolving standards of decency" in American society would consider it cruel and unusual punishment to execute a person for crimes he or she committed as a minor. The question has been argued before the high court, and the justices could issue an opinion as early as this month or as late as June.

Domino effect

When juveniles are condemned to death, it's because the murders they committed were so cruel or heinous that the killers' age could not sway a judge's or jury's mind to instead impose a life sentence.

The Missouri case before the U.S. Supreme Court is no exception.

Christopher Simmons was 17 in 1993 when he and a friend kidnapped a woman just for fun. They bound her with duct tape, hogtied her with wire, then threw her, fully conscious, from a railroad trestle into a river.

Simmons was sentenced to death. But in August, the Supreme Court of Missouri threw out the death sentence and ruled that Simmons should spend his life in prison with no chance of parole. The prosecutors appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

What happens next to Simmons will affect what happens to Bassett in the Arizona case.

Simmons' fate was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 13.

The justices not only will decide whether he lives or dies, but also whether criminals can be put to death for murders they committed while they were 16 or 17 years old.

Across the country, there are 72 young men on death row who fit that description, including the four in Arizona.

In 1988, the high court ruled that people 15 or younger were not eligible for the death penalty; a year later it balked at forbidding executions of 16- and 17-year-olds. And in 2002, by a 5-4 vote, the court refused to reconsider.

"Everyone agrees that there is some age below which juveniles can't be subjected to the death penalty," Seth Waxman, Simmons' attorney, said as he addressed the Supreme Court in October.

"The question here is where our society's evolving standards of decency now draw that line."

The phrase "evolving standards of decency" comes from a 1910 court decision and is generally applied to the Eighth Amendment, which guards against cruel and unusual punishment.

According to the Death Penalty Institute, a Washington-based non-profit organization, 14 states allow executions at age 16; five set the age at 17; 10 set the age at 18. Twelve states have no death penalty statute. In short, 31 states forbid the execution of minors, up from 28 states when the court last considered the issue in 2002.

And many states that can theoretically execute juveniles do not. Arizona has not done so since 1934, although perhaps because all of the young men on death row here have been convicted since 1992 and have not yet exhausted their appeals.

Four of the U.S. Supreme Court justices went on the record against executing juveniles in 2002; three adamantly support the status quo. Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor remain on the fence. If either votes to abolish the practice, it will become law.

"The . . . states that have statutes that theoretically permit execution of offenders under 18 are not only alone in this country," Waxman told the court, "they are alone in the world."

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, all but one foreign country has either abolished juvenile executions or plans to do so.

During oral arguments before the court last month, the justices and attorneys bandied about whether the U.S. courts should be influenced by laws in other countries.

In October 2003, O'Connor told an audience in Atlanta that the court did in fact pay attention to world opinion, and said justices had considered it in a 2002 decision to prohibit executions of the mentally retarded. She reiterated the remarks on Oct. 27 of this year.

In the end, the decision may come down to numbers: How many states do? How many states don't?

And the only comment during the oral arguments made by O'Connor was about the numbers.

"The statistics of how many states have approved 18 years as the line is about the same as it was in the retardation case," she said.

Heinous crimes

If the notion of executing juveniles is appalling, so are the crimes they committed to end up on death row. By definition, their youth already has been considered as a mitigating factor during sentencing.

Bassett confessed to killing Joseph Medrano Pedroza and Frances Tapia, both 22, on June 16.

Bassett had purchased a .12-gauge, sawed-off shotgun from Pedroza and still owed him $50. When Pedroza came to collect, Bassett and another young man got into the back seat of a car driven by Tapia, who was Pedroza's girlfriend.

Bassett told police that Pedroza was threatening him and that he thought Pedroza was reaching for a gun in his belt, so he put his new purchase to the back of Pedroza's head and fired, then turned the gun on Tapia before leaping from the speeding car.

Two days later, when police arrested him, he was making a getaway on his BMX bike.

Bassett was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder.

"That's a capital murder," Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Paul McMurdie said. "Then you ask yourself: Should we impose it on somebody of his age? Our position has always been that that's for the sentencer to decide after they've weighed all the evidence."

In Arizona, the death sentence is imposed by a jury.

If convicted and sentenced to death, Bassett would join four other young men on death row for murders they committed while they were 16 or 17.

But within the past 14 months, two more young men were removed from Arizona's death row.

Christopher Huerstel was convicted of killing three Pizza Hut employees during a robbery in 1999. His conviction was reversed and remanded to Superior Court because the Arizona Supreme Court worried that the jury in his trial had been unduly coerced into passing a verdict by the trial judge.

The other, James Davolt, buried a hatchet in a man's head at Lake Havasu City in 1998, then shot him, took the man's wife hostage and made her empty her bank account before killing her, too. In February, the Arizona Supreme Court threw out his death sentence and asked the lower court "to determine whether Davolt, a juvenile, possessed the maturity and moral responsibility at the time of the offenses sufficient to make him eligible for the death penalty."

That concern on the part of the Arizona Supreme Court goes to the heart of the case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Research

Recent studies have shown that the human brain does not fully develop until sometime in the 20s, meaning that teens do not have the same level of impulse control or reasoning as adults.

The Supreme Court justices discussed that research and wondered how it applied to the Simmons case since it had never been entered into evidence during his trial. Still, looking at how adolescents think draws parallels to the reasons the court used to abolish executions of the mentally retarded.

"The question that the court will be asked to resolve is whether executing a juvenile violates the Eighth Amendment," said Larry Hammond, a Phoenix defense attorney who has tried death penalty cases for 20 years.

"No one really knows what those words 'evolving standards in a maturing society' mean," he said. "But it's a close enough question that you can come to the judgment that the society in this country and around the world has come to a point at which the execution of juveniles is unacceptable."



Reporter Judi Villa contributed to this article.

Reach the reporter at michael.kiefer@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8994.