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Shadow Government
A classroom of high school seniors on death row
by John A. Jackson
In 1914, Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, starting World War I. An Austrian court sentenced Princip to 20 years in prison, the heaviest penalty it could enact.
Princip, you see, was not yet an adult when he committed his crime; he was only 20.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court, voting 3 to 3, refused to delay the execution in Texas of Napoleon Beasley, who may well be dead by the time you read this.
In 1994, when Beasley was 17, he shot and killed John Luttig, 63, while he and two other young men were trying to steal Luttig's car.
Was backward Austria-Hungary more civilized in 1914 than the United States is in 2001? You judge.
I might have written "more civilized than Texas," but the Supreme Court forces me to broaden the comment by endorsing Texas's savage customs. Beasley is one of 31 Texans on Death Row for crimes committed when they were 17. That's a classroom's worth of high school seniors.
Texas, of course, also executes the retarded, and those driven insane while awaiting their death.
Nearly all nations and most U.S. states extend mercy to juveniles who kill. Indeed, Amnesty International recently singled out the Beasley case, and the American Bar Association opposes the death penalty for anyone under 18 when the crime was committed.
A recent worldwide study found only 25 such executions, 15 of them in the United States and seven of those in Texas.
Is a 17-year-old really capable of adult discernment? The law says "no," except in these cases.
In this instance, moreover, one may suspect that the victim's identity mattered much more than the killer's. Beasley had no prior criminal record. Luttig was the father of a federal appeals judge. The three justices who abstained on Beasley all did so because of their close friendship with Judge Luttig.
Did it matter, too, that Luttig was white and Beasley black? In Texas?
Texas has never executed a white man for killing a black. May one suspect-oh, the hell with it. You know what the answer is.
Having capital punishment at all forces the state -- that is ordinary citizens -- to make impossible choices about whom to kill and whom to spare. Obviously, those choices will be influenced by every one of society's biases: since no objective standard is possible, improper subjective ones like race and class will inevitably intrude.
That is an excellent reason for opposing capital punishment. So are the killing of juveniles, the retarded and the insane.
The state or an individual may use lethal force to protect a person from imminent death. Capital punishment, judicial killing, never meets that standard.
CLARIFICATION: In my column two weeks ago, my recollection of the debate in the 1980s over the location of the nation's high-level nuclear waste dump had several flaws.
In particular, Deaf Smith County, Texas, although in the initial running, did not make the playoffs. The three leading candidates were Yucca Mountain, Nevada, Richland, Washington, and Hereford, Texas. Like Deaf Smith, the Hereford site was a salt bed, one of seven salt sites being considered.
The National Science Foundation always supported a salt site; the salt itself is proof the site is not connected to the water table. The best of those was in Utah. But the Department of Energy favored the sites it already owned, and which had seen military use, in Nevada and Washington. Politics eventually ruled out the Texas site.
As my scientist friend says, "The nuclear waste issue is a political problem, not a technical problem." To which I would add only that political problems are real, too.
"In light of global warming," he says, "I'm actually glad nuclear is being considered again." And there we differ.
John A. Jackson may be reached at TomShadwell@cs.com. ER