When the colony of Massachusetts executed 16 year old Thomas Graunger in 1642 for the crime of bestiality, the tradition of executing children in this country was born. It continued over the years executing children of different ages for various crimes, the youngest child being only 10 years old.

The question of the morality of executing juveniles arose in 1944 when the state of South Carolina executed George Stinney, a 14 year old black boy who was so small they had trouble strapping his tiny legs to the electric chair. When the guards finally had George in place the hidden executioner began the first jolt of electricity, causing the mask to fall from George's face, thus revealing the horrors of electrocution. But the questions didn't last long, this was after all a poor black boy who was executed after a three hour trial for the murder of two white girls. George's attorney was running for political office and this case could only hurt his chance of election. He did not cross examine witnesses, he did not advocate for his client, he presented no evidence on George's behalf. What he did do was allow his client to be executed a mere six weeks after his trial.

The tradition of executing juveniles which was born in Massachusetts was carried on in most states over the centuries, and lives on today. We saw it continued in February of this year with the execution of Sean Sellers in Oklahoma. We see it in our death row populations across the country. We see it here, in Kentucky where we have two people on death row for crimes committed as juveniles.

This tradition should have been stopped long ago. George Stinney and many of the other children murdered by the state or facing execution now did not have adequate advocacy. This lack of advocacy flies in the face of the most basic rights afforded us by the constitution. But in particular, as juveniles it contradicts the very precept of the design of the juvenile justice system.

The juvenile justice system in this country was founded under the doctrine of parens patriae which means, the state as the parent. This doctrine was adopted from the English tradition of common law which encouraged all adjudications of juveniles to be in the child's best interest. The state was to treat a child who broke the law much as a wise parent would deal with a wayward child. Under the doctrine of parens patriae, juvenile law breakers were viewed as VICTIMS of improper care, custody, and treatment at home and the state had a sovereign duty to protect that child.

In the United States today, we have lost sight of the inherent responsibility that the state has to protect all children. We continue to execute people for crimes committed as children, even though we failed miserably in protecting those children when they needed it the most.

In the United States, 25 states allow the execution of juveniles, 9 states set the minimum age for execution at 16, 4 at 17, and 12 have no statutory minimum age, although the Supreme Court has set the minimum age for execution at 16.

No other Western nation, no other industrial nation, no other democracy in the world allows the execution of juveniles. Not even China whose human rights tradition has been greatly lacking at best. In fact, the United States joins only Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen as nations that have executed children in this decade. Since its last juvenile execution, even Yemen has banned this practice.

The United States has on several occasions violently gained control over sovereign nations with the alleged goal of guaranteeing human rights in those countries while at the same time we continue to violate human rights here.

In executing juvenile offenders this country violates 7 international instruments which forbid this practice, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Geneva Conventions, and the American Convention on Human Rights.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child specifically calls for the abolition of the death penalty for juvenile offenders. It specifically calls for an end to cruel and unusual punishment directed at juvenile offenders and it specifically calls for all legal actions taken on behalf of a child to be in that child's best interest.

In executing children, we are violating not only the fundamental foundations of our own juvenile justice system, but we are violating The Convention which we have signed, but failed to ratify. In fact, we are the only member nation which has not taken steps to ratify this convention.

Violating these treaties and protocols is only one of many problems with executing children in America.

The second problem with executing juveniles is that The juvenile death penalty is even more arbitrary and capricious than the death penalty for adults. Research has consistently shown that the application of capital punishment in the United States is entirely arbitrary. From state to state, and even from jurisdiction to jurisdiction within states, defendants who commit similar homicides are treated differently for no apparent reason. Sometimes the state seeks the death penalty, sometimes not. Sometimes juries sentence the offender to death, sometimes not.

Researchers have compared the application of the death penalty to a lottery governed by no rational process at all. The juvenile death penalty is even worse. About 1.8% of all persons executed in the United States were children (under 18 years of age) at the time of the crime.

In the post-Furman era there have been 13 juvenile executions, or about 2% of all executions since 1976. Despite significant increases and declines in juvenile homicide rates in the 1980s and 1990s, the rate of juvenile death sentences has remained constant at about 2% of all executions, raising the question of whether its use is even related to the incidence of homicide.

The Third problem with executing juveniles is that The juvenile death penalty is blatantly racist and sexist. Over 2/3 of the 357 children executed in the United States have been African-Americans. In addition, all of the children executed in the United States for the crimes of rape or attempted rape (40 children in all) were black. 2 out of 3 children sent to death row are African American. And in this century, 3 out of 4 executed juveniles were black.

In addition, the issue of bias by victim race is also present in juvenile death penalty cases. In the post Furman era, 68 percent (n=64) of the cases in which a juvenile was sentenced to death in the United States involved a white victim. Additionally, questions of age and gender bias also arise in view of the fact that 83% of the victims in these cases were adults and half were women. In the post Furman era, 98 percent of the juveniles sentenced to death were male.

Only 4 cases involved females. In this country's history only 9 female juveniles have been executed, 8 were African American, and 1 was Native American. We don't like to kill little girls, but we especially don't like to kill little white girls.

The 4^th problem with the juvenile death penalty is the extraordinarily high rate of reversal by the courts. Of the 177 juvenile death sentences imposed since 1973, only 74 (42%) remain in force.

13 have resulted in executions and 91 have been reversed on appeal (Strieb, 1998). The reversal rate in juvenile death penalty cases is and astounding 88% (91 out of 103). The clear implication of this sobering fact is that in cases where the state wishes to execute a child serious problems of prosecutorial misconduct, defense attorney incompetence, and judicial error appear to dominate.

And finally, what I believe to be the biggest problem with executing juveniles is the inherent hypocrisy in the process. Executing juveniles contradicts virtually every other law concerning children in the United States. The law in most states assumes that juveniles are not of sufficient maturity and judgment to exercise a wide range of rights. In most states the age of majority is 18;

21 is earliest age at which alcohol may be bought, possessed and consumed;
children may not enter into contracts until the age of 18;
children may not buy cigarettes until the age of 18;
children must be 18 before agreeing to donate their organs;
children must be 18 before they may execute a will;
children must be 18 before entering into a marriage;
children must be 18 before being eligible to serve on juries.
and, of course, the 26^th Amendment to the Constitution sets the voting age in the United States at 18. Thus never giving these children the right to vote for the governor who will sign their death warrants.

Inherent in these laws is the assumption that juveniles do not have sufficient responsibility, maturity or judgment to make these many decisions, while at the same time assuming that they are fully in control of their judgments when they engage in criminal behavior is a horrific and illogical contradiction in the law.

This is particularly the case in homicides where much evidence indicates that
(1) children have an undeveloped and unsophisticated concept of death; and
(2) that children are often impulsive and reckless in their actions.

But most importantly the horror of executing children cannot be fully understood until we look at the children who have been murdered by the state in the America. Consistently, pervasively, and invariably the children we execute have four common characteristics:

(1) they were mentally ill or mentally retarded at the time they committed they crime;
(2) they were victims of horrifying sexual and/or physical abuse;
(3) they were victimized by a society which has one of the highest child poverty and infant mortality rates in the world and which consigns many children to lives of hopelessness and grinding poverty; and,
(4) they were represented by inexperienced, unskilled, and incompetent counsel.

Consider the following:

In 1977, Dalton Prejean, at the age of 17 murdered a police officer in Louisiana. This black child was tried before an all-white jury and represented by a court-appointed defense attorney. His IQ was measured at 71, which means he had virtually no capacity to reason. When we was two weeks old his mother abandoned him to the care of a relative with a long history of violence. At the age of 13 he was institutionalized suffering from a series of mental illnesses including schizophrenia. At the age of 14, after having been released from care because of inadequate state resources allocated to mental illness, he murdered a taxi driver. He was recommitted after the murder and doctors recommended long-term hospitalization related to his mental illness. Nonetheless, when state funds once again ran out, Dalton was once again released, and committed the crime for which he was executed on May 18, 1990. Dalton Prejean was murdered by a state that refused to provide him with medical care, refused to provide him with a fair trial and adequate counsel, and that apparently seeks to cure mental illness through execution.

Johnny Garret had a long history of mental illness, a history of severe sexual and physical abuse as a child, and suffered from chronic brain damage as a result of head injuries sustained in that abuse. At the age of 17 he murdered a 76-year-old nun and despite direct intervention by Pope John Paul II and the Franciscan Sisters (the order to which the nun had belonged), Johnny was finally provided with treatment by the state of Texas for his mental illness, chronic physical ailments and childhood sexual abuse by being executed February 11, 1992.

Curtis Harris was one of nine children brought up in a family with an alcoholic father who regularly beat him throughout his childhood. Curtis was one of the 21% of all U.S. children raised in poverty, he was one of 44% of all black children raised in poverty. Incidentally, the U.S. child poverty rate is double that of the United Kingdom (9.9%); triple that of France (6.5%), the Netherlands (6.2%) and Germany (6.8%) and eight times higher than Sweden (2.7%). At his trial, despite the fact that Curtis was an African-American, the state excluded all black jurors. Curtis had an IQ of 77 and suffered from organic brain damage as a result of the beatings inflicted by his father. Once again, however, the state of Texas treated his physical and social infirmities by prescribing death on July 1, 1993.

Frederick Lashley murdered his cousin at the age of 17. At the time of the murder he was acting under the influence of drugs. Frederick had been abandoned by his mother as a young child, had become a heavy drinker of alcohol by the time he was ten, and was homeless at the time he committed the murder. Once again, this African-American child was sentenced to death by an all-white jury, after being represented by an attorney who had never handled a capital case. Incompetent counsel and a racist jury was the only drug treatment ever provided Frederick by the state of Missouri which murdered him July 28, 1993.

Christopher Burger had a low IQ; he was mentally ill; he was brain damaged as a result of severe physical abuse he received as a young child; he grew up in an unstable and highly disturbed family; and he attempted suicide at the age of 15. Despite the fact that these conditions are all statutory mitigators, which juries are required by law to consider in death penalty cases, his attorney, who had never previously handled a capital case, neglected to present any mitigating evidence. Once again, in the state of Georgia, the remedy for mental illness, child abuse and incompetent counsel is execution, which was carried out on December 7, 1993.

At four-years-old, Joseph John Cannon, was hit by a truck. He was left with a severe head injury, hyperactivity, and a speech impediment. Needless to say these conditions did not lead to great success in school, and at the age of six he was expelled and received no further education or care from the state of Texas. He filled his days, when he should have been in school or under medical care, with glue and solvent sniffing and at the age of ten was diagnosed as suffering from severe organic brain damage. Joseph attempted suicide at the age of 15 and was subsequently diagnosed as being schizophrenic and borderline mentally retarded. From the age of seven to the time he committed his murder, he suffered repeated and severe sexual abuse from a serious of male relatives. So horrifying was Joseph's childhood that when he finally escaped his family after being confined on death row he was able to learn to read and write. The state of Texas had not protected him from his family, had not provided him with medical care for his chronic brain injuries, and had not treated his mental illness. Texas did however, reward the educational progress he made when finally sheltered from the day-to-day nightmare of his childhood by killing him in 1998.

Robert Anthony Carter was one of six children in an impoverished black family who grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Houston, Texas. His mother and stepfather routinely beat him throughout his childhood with electrical cords. He suffered serious childhood head injuries, including being struck in the head by brick at age five and being hit on the head so hard with a baseball bat at age ten that the bat broke. Robert received no medical attention for either of these injuries. Shortly before the murder for which he was ultimately convicted, Robert was shot in the head by his brother and suffered thereafter from regular fainting spells and seizures. Nonetheless it took a Texas jury, who heard no mitigating evidence, only ten minutes to sentence him to death.

Dwayne Allen Wright was raised in a poor family in an economically depressed neighborhood of Washington, D.C. When he was four his father was sent to prison. His mother suffered from mental illness and was unemployed throughout much of his childhood. When he was ten his half-brother, the only person Dwayne was close to was murdered. Dwayne developed serious emotional difficulties, did poorly at school and between the ages of 12 and 17 spent most of his time in juvenile detention facilities and hospitals. During this period he was treated for major depression with psychotic episodes, his verbal ability was evaluated as retarded, and doctors diagnosed him with organic brain damage. Upon release, at the age of 17 Dwayne committed a murder for which the commonwealth of Virginia executed him in 1998. The American Bar Association appealed for clemency, stating that his proposed execution "demeans our system of justice" and asserting that "a borderline mentally retarded child simply cannot be held to the same degree of culpability and accountability to which we would hold an adult."

And finally, Sean Sellers was sentenced to death in 1986 for the murders of three people, including his parents. The jury that sentenced Sean to die did not know that when he was 13 years old, he still wet the bed. While under the care of his uncle, he was forced to wear diapers. On the occasions that Sean wet the bed two nights in a row, his uncle forced him to wear the soiled diapers on his head all day as punishment. This same uncle tried to teach Sean how to kill animals by stepping on the animal's head and pulling its legs. The jury did not hear that Sean suffered from severe brain damage as a result of head trauma as a child and the jury did not hear that Sean suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder. When this information was released to the public, one of the jurors came forward and asked for Clemency for Sean. Yet, despite international pleas and a public outpouring of support for clemency; despite a court's ruling that he was "factually innocent" of the crimes for which he had been convicted; despite the Pope's condemnation of the death penalty less than a week before the execution; despite the urgings of one of the jurors who had convicted him that clemency be granted, neither Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating nor the clemency board would relent. Sean Sellers was executed on February 4 , 1999.

So what children are selected for execution in the United States?

The answers are the poor, the mentally retarded, the sexually and physically abused, those with chronic and congenital physical defects, those represented by incompetent counsel and those refused treatment for their maladies by the state which will ultimately murder them.

We engage in state murder of children who are our social trash. So the truth of juvenile executions in the United States is that we execute the ill and infirm without providing them with any advocacy. To say that such a policy reeks of eugenics and "ethnic cleansing" is almost an understatement. It is up to us now to stop this tradition of violence and inhumanity. It is up to us to finally protect all the children of this country. It is up to us to adhere to the basic fundamentals of human rights and dignity. The time has come to start acting in the best interest of the child.