Bianca Jagger Reflects on Working Toward Peace
United States is the only democracy in the Western world
that continues to execute its citizens. It is ironic that
a country that proclaims itself to be the world's most progressive
force for human rights is the leading member of a far less
distinguished circle of nations, whose claim to fame is
that they execute people for crimes they committed as children.
Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen are the
only other countries known to have executed juvenile offenders
during the past decade, killing nine among them. The United
States executed ten juvenile offenders in the 1990s, more
than the rest of the world combined, and it is becoming
increasingly isolated in this practice. Indeed, in 1994
Yemen abolished the execution of juveniles under age eighteen.
Furthermore, China, which has the world's highest number
of annual executions, has also abolished the death penalty
for people who commit crimes as children.
Fifty years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, with its vision of universal freedoms,
more than half the countries in the world have abolished
the death penalty in law and practice. The United Nations
convention on the rights of the child in article 37(a) proscribes
imposing the death penalty on persons for offenses they
commit when still children. One hundred and ninety-two countries
have ratified this human rights treaty, all except Somalia-a
nearly collapsed state-and the United States.
More than 350 years have elapsed since the execution in
1642 of Thomas Graunger in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He was
the first recorded person to be executed for offenses he
committed at the age of sixteen. Although the methods of
execution have changed, and some states would like us to
believe their methods are more humane, nothing can mask
the horror of a government taking the lives of its own children.
It is a barbaric practice. More than 360 juvenile offenders
have been executed since Thomas Graunger.
Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, the
United States has proceeded in its wholesale expansion of
state-sanctioned killing. According to the Death Penalty
Information Center, sixteen people have been executed for
crimes they committed when still children; this is in flagrant
violation of international law, as well as evolving standards
of humanity and decency. Currently the United States has
juvenile death row population in the world: sixty-nine.
Sixty-four percent of them are minorities-black or Latino.
In the first four months of 2000, the United States executed
three people for crimes they committed when under age eighteen.
In 1988's Thompson v. Oklahoma ruling, the Supreme Court
held that executions of offenders age fifteen and younger
at the time of their crimes are unconstitutional. Yet individual
states can set the minimum age below eighteen. According
to Professor Streib at Ohio Northern University, of the
thirty-eight states that allow the death penalty, fifteen
set the age at eighteen, five at seventeen, and nineteen
have a minimum age of sixteen.
For twenty years, I have campaigned for justice and human
rights throughout the world, speaking on behalf of children's
rights, women's rights, and victims of war crimes. I am
a member of the executive director's leadership council
of Amnesty International U.S.A. Four years ago,
I received a call from their Chicago office to file a clemency
petition for Guinevere Garcia, who was scheduled to be executed
on January 17, 1996. Guinevere had withdrawn all her appeals.
Her life had been scarred by violence; beginning at age
six she had been sexually abused by her uncle. I moved to
Chicago for a short while to work on her case with Amnesty
International. I made a personal plea to Governor Edgar
of Illinois to grant clemency to Guinevere and commute her
sentence to life imprisonment without parole. Governor Edgar
granted her clemency, stating that Guinevere's case was
"not the kind of case I had in mind when I voted as
a legislator to restore the death penalty and acted as governor
to expand it. It also is not the kind of case that typically
results in a death sentence in Illinois."
Since that time, I have spoken on behalf of many death row
juveniles. On some of those cases, I worked with the Coalition
to Abolish the Death Penalty's program called Stop Killing
Kids. One case was that of Shareef Cousin, an innocent child
sentenced to death in Louisiana at the age of sixteen. It
took three long years before this miscarriage of justice
was corrected. He was the eighth child sentenced to death
in Louisiana. In each of these cases, the child facing execution
was black. The death penalty has always been fraught with
After Shareef, we have never been able to save another young
person on death row. Sean Sellers, who suffered from a mental
disorder and a brain injury, was the first United States
citizen in forty years to be executed for a crime committed
at sixteen. His case illustrates the lack of meaningful
appellate review. Sean was a compelling case for clemency,
yet he was denied that relief. Clemency should be an essential
part of our criminal justice system. It should be the state's
mechanism by which to remedy legal errors and to recognize
the extent of a person's growth, remorse, and rehabilitation.
Sean met several of the humanitarian criteria. His execution
only served to complete the cycle of violence.
Sean talked to me days before he was executed about the
double standard of the legal system in the United States,
which draws clear lines excluding juveniles from certain
activities deemed appropriate only for adults. "In
this country," he said, "a child of sixteen is
barely old enough to drive, cannot vote or serve on a jury,
cannot join the military. He is not allowed to purchase
alcohol and cigarettes in most states until he reaches twenty-one."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, working with death penalty persons
has changed my life. In many ways, it has brought me closer
to God. I was very affected by the execution of Karla Faye
Tucker. She was no longer a threat to society and was fully
rehabilitated. When I met her at the Mountain View Prison
near Austin, Texas, days before her execution by lethal
injection, Karla was calm and ready to receive whatever
God had in store for her. I will never forget the day she
was executed. Hundreds of people clamored and celebrated
outside the Huntsville, Texas, prison when it was announced
she had lost her final appeal. When the loudspeaker declared
that her execution had begun at 6:16 p.m., people cheered
and applauded. It was an image reminiscent of public lynchings
from the Middle Ages. I cannot understand how people can
find pleasure in, or believe that civilized values are served
by, the killing of another human being.
In spite of the merits of Sean Sellers's case, he received
the ultimate penalty for his crime: death. I speak on behalf
of Sean, and those like him, as a human rights advocate
who recognizes that it is the human capacity for change
and redemption that endows us all with the potential to
become better people. Killing Sean, or killing Karla Faye
Tucker, shuts out the light of redemption that exists in
all of us.
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