Bad Company

By Edward Humes

What do Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Congo and the United States have in common? They are the only nations in the world known to execute juvenile offenders.

More surprising still than the company the US keeps on this issue is the fact that America is the clear frontrunner in this group. Twenty-one states allow the death penalty for murders committed at age 16 or 17, and there are currently 83 juvenile offenders on death row, a dark twist on President Bush’s “Leave No Child Behind” philosophy. (Bush’s home state of Texas has led the charge by conducting six of the last eight executions of juvenile offenders in the US since the new millennium, a practice he supported as governor. There have been a total of 21 juvenile offenders executed since the death penalty resumed in 1976, 13 of them in Texas.)

While Yemen and Pakistan have recently banned juvenile death sentences and every nation in the world except the US and that bastion of inhuman rights, Somalia, home of Blackhawk Down, have signed onto a United Nations convention ending executions for juvenile offenses, the practice continued in the US as recently as August 28. That’s when Toronto Patterson of Dallas was put to death in Texas for crimes in committed in 1995 at age seventeen.

Now, though, the US may be poised to part company with the eye-for-an-eye, ayatollah approach to dealing with dangerous children. In the Patterson case, several justices of the US Supreme Court indicated they feel the time has come to revisit this policy (though not in time for the lethally injected Patterson).

“Given the apparent consensus that exists among the states and in the international community against the execution of a capital sentence imposed on a juvenile offender, I think it would be appropriate to revisit the issue at the earliest opportunity,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a dissent to the court’s decision decline to stay Patterson’s execution. Last June, the high court banned the execution of the mentally retarded, and death-penalty litigators have suggested the same logic might by applied by the justices to executions of juvenile offenders — that they lack the mental capacity to be held to the same standards as normal adults.

Most nations, except for the aforementioned Iraq, Iran, et al, seem to think this issue is a no-brainer. Everyone in the U.S. agrees, it would seem, that children are not the same as adults — that they lack the maturity, judgment and cognitive abilities that grown-ups possess. Our laws and policies enshrine this notion, and rightly so: That is why the drinking age is 21. That is why the voting age is 18. That’s why children don’t serve on juries, or in the armed forces or pilot airliners or serve as president. That is why we don’t allow juveniles to sign legally binding contracts, or to smoke cigarettes, or to have sex with adults (the theory of statutory rape, after all, is that minors do not have the capacity to consent). No one questions the reasoning behind those very sound policies, nor should they.

Yet when a kid picks up a gun and uses it to do something terrible, this logic seemingly vanishes. In that case, and that case alone, we say that a kid is no different than an adult, and that it’s okay to execute him. Toronto Patterson wanted to steal some hubcaps from a cousin. Hubcaps. When it was over, the cousin was dead. So were her two kids, ages 6 and 3. Patterson committed murder, a hideous, unforgivable taking of human life. There is no defending or explaining his vile acts. He was an animal.

But he was also a kid when he committed murder. He was not an adult. He was not mature enough to vote or crack a beer or get a car loan. That has to count for something. In the United States of America, at least, we have to be better than that, better than Iraq and Iran. We have to be better than Toronto Patterson, who had no compunction about taking the lives of children.