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An Unjust Punishment?: The Juvenile Death Penalty
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16965 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1990 |
3,345 Words |
| Author
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Victor L. Streib
Victor L. Streib is professor of law at Cleveland State
University. He is the author of Death Penalty for Juveniles
(Indiana University Press, 1987) and, as an attorney, has
represented juveniles on death row before that U.S. Supreme
Court and other courts |
Paula Cooper, an articulate, attractive college-correspondence student at age twenty, can barely remember the impulsive fifteen-year-old she was when she and three friends committed a brutal murder. Bounced around from school to school, Paula had been repeatedly abused by her parents and was personally adrift in a Gary, Indiana, ghetto. After her unexplainable emotional explosion resulting in the murder, Paula was convicted and sentenced to die in Indiana's electric chair - an adult sentence for an adult crime committed by a child. That sentence was reversed shortly before Paula's twentieth birthday, but the alternative given her was sixty years in prison. Even at her earliest parole date, this blossoming woman-child will be on Social Security before she is released from prison.
Dalton Prejean may not be so lucky. He has turned thirty while sitting on Louisiana's death row, awaiting execution for murdering a policeman when he was a drunken seventeen-year-old. Dalton also was abused as a child, is mildly retarded, and has lived a tumultuous life. In 1974, at age fourteen, he killed a taxi driver and was sent to a reform school for three years. Dalton was out of reform school only six months when he murdered the state police officer. Louisiana seems determined to execute Dalton, having come within a few hours of doing so on November 19, 1989. But the U.S. Supreme Court granted yet another stay so that the case can be reviewed one more time. Meanwhile, Dalton waits.
HISTORY AND MAGNITUDE OF THE JUVENILE DEATH PENALTY
Paula and Dalton are just two of the approximately seventy-five offenders sentenced to death in the 1980s for crimes committed while under age eighteen. Such sentences represent less than 3 percent of the total death sentences imposed during that decade. Since earliest colonial days, probably several thousand juveniles have been sentenced to death.
As rare as juvenile death sentences have been, it has been much rarer for actual executions to result from such sentences. In fact, the 1980s saw only three persons executed for juvenile crimes, and only 282 such executions have occurred throughout American history. Compare those numbers to the 117 adults executed in the 1980s and more than 16,000 adults executed in American history. The three actual juvenile executions carried out in the 1980s were
· Charles F. Rumbaugh; executed September 11, 1985, in Texas; seventeen at crime and twenty-eight at execution;
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