Spare America's Children the Chair

AT A SEPTEMBER news conference, Attorney General Edwin Meese III tried to justify the death sentence for minors who commit capital crimes. "You have kids becoming increasingly sophisticated--I suppose largely by watching television--they're just smarter, you know." It "follows" that "a state is justified at imposing a cutoff age for the death penalty at what they think is appropriate," even if this entails the execution of people who are otherwise not held responsible by the law for their actions.

Meese's implausible assertions epitomize the ad hoc nature of the rationalizations usually offered in support of state-sanctioned murder. Normally, one could reject remarks like these as unfounded yet insignificant in comparison with more substantive views on the issue. But like it or not, Meese is the attorney general, and one cannot cursorily dismiss his views on capital punishment as having no bearing on the administration of "justice" in the United States.

In fact, Meese's statements constitute far more than the incoherent ramblings of a narrow-minded ideologue, since they typify a broad repressive trend within the criminal justice system. Increasingly, this attitude has characterized a significant proportion of the people in positions to convict criminals, sentence them, strike down their appeals, sign their death warrants, and flick the switch on the chair. Juvenile execution is simply the most obvious example, since the execution of minors requires an idea brutal and convincing enough to obliterate the traditional sympathies which compel us to extend lenience to children.

Meese's remarks were a response to the state of Texas' execution in September of Charles Rumbaugh Jr., who robbed and killed an Amarillo jeweller in 1975 at the tender age of 17. Rumbaugh's death by lethal injection was the first execution since 1964 of someone sentenced as a minor. Last month, Rumbaugh was succeeded by South Carolina's Terry Roach, who was convicted--also at the age of 17--for criminal sexual assault and two counts of murder. Thirty-one other death-row convicts await capital punishment for crimes committed before the age of legal maturity. Sixteen of them are white, 15 are Black, and two-thirds are in the South.

THE SUPREME COURT, which has never actually heard a case challenging juvenile executions and has thus never explictly condoned the practice, nevertheless lets the individual states set their minimum ages. In the 35 states which permit capital punishment, six have set the minimum at 18, 15 have set minimums ranging from 10 to 17 years, 11 permit executions at all ages while requiring judges to consider youth a mitigating factor, and three (Delaware, Oklahoma, and South Dakota) have no minimums whatsoever.

The appeals for the 31 remaining juveniles are running out, and we will be faced with executing them. Perhaps the Supreme Court will finally hear a case on the constitutionality of these executions--much legal opinion argues that capital punishment of minors violates the 16th Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

Apart from the obvious moral appeals, the opponents of capital punishment for minors point to the logical inconsistency in the general argument for capital punishment. That is: criminals are human beings who know right from wrong and should be punished for their willful destruction of other people's lives. But this contradicts the portrayal of murderers as atavistic and amoral threats to order. For how can someone with no conscience be held responsible for an unconscionable act?

The argument can be expanded when the killer is a child, someone who is defined by the law as irresponsible, and who is presumably too immature to vote or to enter into a contract or to purchase alcohol and tobacco. Additionally, many of the criminals who have been executed recently have been mentally retarded--Roach, for instance, had an IQ of only 76. Certainly, a mentally impaired individual cannot make the sort of moral judgements assumed by the concept of capital punishment. The position is inconsistent and arbitrary, period. It also forgets that the young are the most likely to be rehabilitated; if anyone ought to be executed, the youngest should be the last on the list.

Because juvenile execution evokes such strongly conflicting values, it greatly intensifies the moral import of the debate over capital punishment. To borrow the cliche, it "raises the stakes."

We try to forgive and reform our problem children, but all too often this humane tenet of civilization is over-whelmed by the inhumane clamour for violent reprisal. Regretably, Meese and others have opted for the pessmistic, medieval alternative, and the immediate gratification of the lust for retribution will be the unjustifiable execution of 31 more death-row inmates who were convicted while they were still children in the eyes of the law.