Articles about juveniles sentenced to death

No minimum age for executions in Florida Editorial, St. Petersburg Times, April 11, 2001 In a rare moment of enlightenment, the Florida House of Representatives tentatively voted last week to exempt all juveniles from the death penalty. Those who said it was too good to be true were right. In a monumental double-cross, the House leadership pulled the bill from the floor Tuesday to keep it from passing. In the same orchestrated sequence, the House approved a constitutional amendment to restrict the Florida Supreme Court's discretion in the matter by forbidding only that punishment which is both cruel and unusual, the federal terminology. The practical result: Defendants as young as 16 would face capital punishment again. This was a disgrace, and how some members frothed on the floor was disgusting. Would the amendment overrule the court's 1999 Brennan decision setting 17 as the minimum age? "I sure hope so," said Rep. Gaston I. Cantens, R-Miami, a former prosecutor. And so it went. The order of the day was to "send a message to the people across the street," as Rep. Johnny B. Byrd Jr., R-Plant City, put it. The House has been spoiling for revenge since the court threw out a similar amendment, after its approval by voters in 1998, on grounds that the ballot issue was worded deceptively. The amendment was unnecessary then, and it is unnecessary now. Given the consequence to 16-year-olds, it is also barbaric and hugely embarrassing to Florida's world image. There were vague promises Tuesday to set 17 as the minimum age if such a bill comes from the Senate. That, of course, is the status quo, which the Senate could -- and should -- honorably preserve simply by doing nothing. Wasted youth Before Douglas Christopher Thomas was old enough to vote, buy a beer or serve on a jury, the state of Virginia decided he was old enough to die. Convicted of murdering his girlfriend's parents when he was 17, Thomas was executed by lethal injection on Jan. 10.    "Everyone makes mistakes as a teenager, some bigger than others," said Thomas, 26, by phone from Virginia's Sussex I maximum security state prison in December. "What I did was wrong. But I'm not the same person I was at 17." No one, including Thomas, denied that he committed a horrible crime and deserves punishment. The United States, however, is by now virtually the only country in the world where someone as young as he was when he committed his crime can receive the ultimate punishment -- death. This January, Virginia and Texas plan to kick off the new millennium by executing four inmates for crimes they committed while they were, by most people's definition, just kids. One of those executions is expected to be postponed, but even if the total is only three, "it will be the highest number of executions of juveniles not only in one month, but even in a single year" since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, says Bryan Stevenson, a prominent death-penalty defense lawyer and director of Alabama's Equal Justice Initiative. According to Amnesty International, only five other countries are known to have executed juvenile offenders in the 1990s: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, and Yemen. The US has executed more juvenile criminals than all of them combined -- and is the only one known to have put any to death since 1997. Every country on earth has ratified the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the death penalty for juvenile offenders, with two exceptions: Somalia, which effectively has no government, and the US. Even China, one of the world's most enthusiastic criminal-killers, recently banned juvenile executions. "We've always been the world leader in juvenile executions," says Victor Streib, dean of Ohio Northern University's College of Law and author of a biannual report on the juvenile death penalty. "Now we're the only ones." Killing offenders too young to be considered adults has a long history in the US. The first such execution was in Massachusetts in 1642, when a 17-year-old boy was put to death for having sex with animals. The youngest person executed in modern times was a 14 year old who was electrocuted in South Carolina in 1944. Today, the Supreme Court has set 16 as the minimum age for death penalty eligibility, but there are many who would like to see that lowered. Former California Gov. Pete Wilson suggested lowering the age limit to 14, and a Texas state legislator has introduced a bill to make it 11. Currently, there are some 70 juvenile offenders on death row around the country. All are male. Two thirds of them are black or Hispanic, and two thirds of their victims were white. The death penalty is generally thought of as a punishment reserved for the worst of the worst, the callous, hardened men and women with long histories of brutality and no hope of redemption. Critics of juvenile-offender executions say it simply shouldn't apply to even violent criminals whose youth offers the potential for rehabilitation. While each of the three young men firmly slated for death next month did commit murder, none had a significant previous history of violence, nor even a particularly impressive criminal record. Their brief lives resemble those of thousands of troubled, trouble-making teenagers -- with the difference that theirs went off the rails with a single burst of unexpected violence. Glenn Charles McGinnis, 26 and on Texas' death row, had a history of shoplifting and auto theft, but no prison record until, at 17, he tried to rob a dry cleaner's and wound up shooting the attendant to death. Steve Roach, now 23 and awaiting execution in Virginia, had been arrested for car theft and breaking-and-entering, but had no history of violence before he inexplicably blasted his 70-year-old neighbor with a shotgun and stole her car. Three days after the murder, Roach turned himself in to the county sheriff and made a full confession. "I was 17. I don't know what I was thinking," said Roach by phone from Sussex I. "I don't think I had a reason for what I did." Thomas' case in particular points up the arbitrary nature of laws which attempt to distinguish between responsible adults and salvageable children. In 1991, Thomas and his then-girlfriend, Jessica Wiseman, were convicted of killing Jessica's parents. The Wisemans had forbidden 14-year-old Jessica from seeing Thomas, then 17. Several people testified at Thomas' trial that Jessica was the real mastermind behind the crime. Even the federal judge who turned down one of Thomas' recent appeals acknowledged that "the record strongly supports the conclusion that it was Jessica Wiseman who wanted her parents killed and who instigated Thomas to carry out her wishes." But Jessica was a minor, and so was sent to a juvenile detention facility until she turned 21. She is now free. Thomas, just three years older, was sentenced to death. "I was just over the line," he said, "and she was just under." One of the main reasons that there are separate courts and penal systems for juveniles and adults is the notion that young criminals have the potential to learn the error of their ways. "We've always recognized that the essential meaning of childhood is that you will change," says Stevenson. "To take a single act of a child, even a terrible, horrific act, and say that we'll take their life because of it contradicts that. It's legitimate to say they should be punished, but not to say they'll never change." That argument cuts no ice with juvenile death-penalty supporters. "McGinnis was no child then, and he isn't one now," says Michael Jones, a spokesperson for Texas governor George W. Bush, a whole-hearted death-penalty enthusiast. "He was six feet tall and weighed 170 pounds when he went in and murdered a woman, shot her three times in the head and back for $140. This young man was judged to be a serious danger to his community, and that's why he received the sentence he did." McGinnis, like many juvenile death-row residents, is the product of a savagely abusive upbringing. His crack-addicted mother used their one-bedroom apartment as base for her prostitution business. At various times in his childhood, his mother and stepfather beat him with a baseball bat, whipped him with an electric cord and poured hot grease on his stomach. His stepfather raped McGinnis when he was about nine. The jury, however, didn't buy his attorney's argument that McGinnis' traumatic upbringing should earn him a measure of mercy. Neither does Dianne Clements, director of Justice for All, a Texas crime victims' advocacy organization. "There are lots of people with worse childhoods who don't commit capital crimes," she says. Whether an appropriate punishment or not, another common argument in favor of the death penalty -- that it serves as a deterrent -- doesn't seem to apply when it comes to teenagers, who notoriously think themselves invincible. Both Roach and Thomas say they didn't even realize they might face execution for their crimes. "I thought at the most I'd get a certain number of years, and then me and Jessica would be together again," recalls Thomas. Roach, and McGinnis still have a chance to escape death. Ross D'Emanuele, McGinnis' lawyer, is preparing an appeal based on international law. The US has actually signed a treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, that specifically bars death sentences for persons under 18. The Senate, however, inserted a condition exempting the US from that particular clause. D'Emanuele hopes to convince the Supreme Court that the Senate had no right to do so, thereby earning his client -- and possibly Roach and other condemned juveniles as well -- at least a stay of execution while the issue is sorted out. All three are also pleading for clemency from their respective state governors, stressing the lack of violence in their backgrounds apart from the murders they were convicted of. That avenue, however, hardly seems promising. Virginia's governor, Jim Gilmore, has only commuted a death sentence to life in prison once, and then only for a severely mentally ill inmate. Texas' Bush has also commuted only one death sentence, for a man who confessed to a murder he did not commit. A commutation on strictly humanitarian grounds seems unlikely, especially given Bush's presidential aspirations in a country where a large majority of the public supports the death penalty. Even President Clinton felt obliged, during his 1992 campaign, to return to Arkansas and personally sign the death warrant for a brain-damaged inmate. Death penalty opponents, however, are hoping that the growing chorus of international outrage may help change the atmosphere in the US. Amnesty International has launched a major campaign to draw attention to juvenile executions, and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty claims to have gathered nearly 50,000 signatures for a petition demanding a moratorium. And at a press conference last October, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Washington to abandon juvenile executions. "How can we lecture to other countries about their human rights practices while this continues?" asks Streib. "The fact that international law deems it wrong, and that no other country does it, should force us to look at ourselves." April 2 2000, The Greenville News SOUTH CAROLINA---legislation to ban juvenile executions The youngest person ever executed in the United States was a 14-year-old black teen from South Carolina whose feet did not touch the floor when he sat in the electric chair. That was 57 years ago. There are no boys that young on the modern-day death row, which was formulated in 1977 after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated capital punishment as cruel and unusual and states passed new laws. But South Carolina remains distinctive. 3 men now on death row were 16 and 2 were 17, the 3rd highest number in the nation of convicted murderers who were younger than voting age when the crimes for which they were convicted were committed. Texas has 23; Alabama 16. In addition, South Carolina is 1 of 7 states to have executed someone who was 17 or younger at the time of the crime. But that could change. South Carolina's General Assembly is considering a bill to stop the execution of anyone who was younger than 17 when the crimes took place. The legislation is backed by a disparate group of South Carolina lawyers, former prosecutors, religious leaders and child advocates who formed a nonprofit organization last year. They say executing someone so young is inhumane, that it is retribution for a crime when society should push for redemption. "Considering all the ways our society has failed our children, from crack babies to horrible public schools to pathetic health care, we should at least ask our government not to willfully kill them," said Zoe Sanders Nettles, a Columbia lawyer and former prosecutor who heads South Carolinians for the Alternatives to the Execution of Children. Donnie Myers, the prosecutor in Lexington County who sent 2 of the 5 to death row, said they are hardly innocent children. One, Billy Kelly, was 17 when he stabbed a pregnant woman so many times a pathologist could not count all the wounds, he said. The woman was Kelly's former boss at KFC in Batesville-Leesville. The 5 inmates are all in their 20s now, living in single cells in the death row complex at Lieber Correctional Institution near Summerville with 67 other condemned men. One, Joseph Hudgins, an Anderson man who was 17 when a 21-year-old deputy sheriff was murdered, recently was granted a new trial by the South Carolina Supreme Court because of errors in his trial. He says his friend committed the December 1992 homicide. 2 of the men who were 16 when the crimes were committed are mentally retarded: Herman Lee Hughes Jr., 23, convicted of killing a 20-year-old man in a robbery of a video poker parlor in Orangeburg in 1994, and Ted Benjamin Powers, 27, convicted of robbing and killing a 68-year-old man as he slept beside his wife in Lexington County in 1990. He is the longest serving of the 5. Also 16 at the time of the crime was Robert Conyers, now 25, who beat a 2-year-old girl to death in Clarendon County in 1991. Conyers also was convicted of raping the girl's mother and beating her 5-year-old brother. Documents on file in the South Carolina Supreme Court show Conyers also confessed to raping and killing a woman when he was 14 and to raping and beating another woman 5 days after killing the 2-year-old. He attempted to rape a 4th woman 3 months later, court records show. The record also shows he once was a star football player at Manning High School. They all have very big problems," Nettles said. "They have not developed. Their judgment has not developed." Conyers' father was a drug trafficker who beat him and was known as the town bully, court records show. Hughes' parents abandoned him. Powers, always looking to please people, confessed to a number of crimes police believe he did not do before confessing to murder, his case file shows. Don Zelenka, a lawyer with the state Attorney General's Office who handles death penalty appeals for the state, could not be reached for comment, but he said in a debate on the issue last year that if the circumstances of the crime justify the penalty, it should be given regardless of age, he said. Age is one of many factors juries consider in weighing the penalty. Generally, the age to be tried as an adult in South Carolina is 17, with the option of handling the matter in adult court for younger defendants if the crime is heinous enough. In a ruling in 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court said states should not execute defendants 15 and younger. In response, 19 states do not execute convicted murderers unless they are at least 16, 5 at least 17. The Arkansas legislature on Thursday defeated a proposal to increase the age to 17. The federal government does not allow the death penalty for anyone younger than 18. Rep. Joe Neal, a Democrat from Hopkins and one of the sponsors of the legislation to set the age at 17, said it is a statement of cynicism and resignation that the state would allow such executions. "Execution, that's a terminal decision," he said. "It simply says as a society we've given up on our young people. I think that's a tragic statement for this state to make and for this country. That's why it's imperative that we as a state not allow an inhuman act, which is the execution of a child." He said there have been many cases of young people making tragic choices and then turning their lives around. "Look at all of us. We're not the same people we were at 14, 15, 16," he said. "Part of the reason we ought to have a little mercy is because they are immature. That is not to say we excuse them. That does not necessarily mean we ought to give up hope that they can be rehabilitate them. All that does is kill and terminate another life. That's simply vengeance." A spokesman for Gov. Jim Hodges said the governor has not reviewed the legislation. Nettles said the government ought not allow juveniles to be executed because it makes special provisions for children all the time. It requires they be educated and cared for properly. "What we're talking about is the government killing them," she said. But Myers does not see it that way. "The state doesn't kill people," he said. "The state carries out the law."