[antiwar-van] STEPHEN HUME ON AMERICAN BRUTALITY

[Carole Karkhairan]

Brutal treatment of young prisoners isn't restricted
to Iraq
Stephen Hume  
Vancouver Sun 
April 24, 2003

Upon discovering that Saddam Hussein's henchmen
maintained a brutal prison for the children of the
disloyal, one of my colleagues in the national press
expressed a predictable loathing:

"I was stunned," she wrote with a stylish rhetorical
flourish. "What kind of regime locks up and tortures
children?"

Now that's a good question. Because juvenile detention
facilities in the U.S. were recently found by federal
investigators to show a "pattern of egregious
conditions." Violations of incarcerated children's
rights included physical abuse, excessive use of
discipline, overcrowded and unsafe conditions,
inadequate educational, medical and mental health
services.

Just as the Americans were announcing that the
liberation of Iraq would be followed by "steadfast
commitment . . . to advance internationally agreed
human rights principles worldwide," the U.S. was for
the fourth time in 12 months preparing to participate
in a practice that Amnesty International denounces as
"indecent and illegal."

The U.S. has the barbarous distinction of having
executed more people for crimes committed as children
than any other country -- and that during a period
when 40 more nations were abolishing the death penalty
entirely, bringing the global total to 111. When it
comes to the execution of juvenile offenders, it seems
the U.S. is a rogue state in the international
community.

Last year, even among the bloody dictatorships it
identifies as the "axis of evil," the U.S. was the
only country known to have executed juvenile
offenders. And it executed its first juvenile offender
for 2003 on April 3.

Some of those executed committed dreadful crimes. But
almost universally, the international community
rejects the execution of juvenile offenders -- and
that includes the U.S. ploy of sentencing child
criminals to death and then warehousing them until
they age enough to be killed. The Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights describes this as a
violation of moral law from which no country can
exempt itself. 

Today, there are more than 80 inmates in the U.S. who
were sentenced to death while they were still minors
and now await some grisly form of execution. 

Among those on death row are an illiterate with an IQ
of 69; another who believes people can't see him when
his eyes are closed; and a former mental patient
previously committed to a mental hospital for paranoid
schizophrenia who required sedation during the trial
to suppress hallucinations.

Among those already executed are a man with the
intellectual capacities of a 12-year-old who acted
while under the domination of other adults and one
who, after confessing to a murder, crawled into the
lap of his interrogator hoping for a cuddle.

What's more, although violent crimes by juveniles have
been falling in the U.S., excessive numbers of
children still go to jail. Over the last decade,
Amnesty International points out, 40 states enacted
legislation making it easier for children to be tried
as adults and 42 states held children in adult jails
while awaiting trial.

Although every major international human rights treaty
expressly prohibits execution for crimes committed by
individuals before the age of 18, the U.S.-based
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
reports scores of people who committed crimes while
legally children have been electrocuted, gassed or
killed by lethal injection in the U.S. in the last 30
years.

As recently as 1996, prosecutors in the state of
Mississippi sought the death penalty for offenders as
young as 13. Some have had the death penalty imposed
for crimes committed when they were as young as 10.
The coalition points out that one 14-year-old black
child executed in South Carolina was so small that his
mask fell off while he was being electrocuted. 

In case you hadn't guessed already, I am opposed to
capital punishment under any circumstances. I have
been in the abolitionist camp since reading the
eyewitness description of the execution of Socrates.

The Greek philosopher actually accepted the argument
that the state had the right to execute him. He abided
by the law and accepted its decision. Thus the
greatest thinker of his age, an honoured veteran whose
only crime was to ask troubling questions, executed
himself at the state's direction by drinking poison.
He refused to beg mercy from his persecutors or to
flee, although both options were available.

Consider Socrates' decision in the context of Jesus
Christ, another individual who accepted the
authorities' right to order his execution -- and who
publicly absolved them of their judicial sin. Of
course, the righteous executioners cared nothing for
that. What was to be forgiven? Christ had his trial,
drew the death penalty and that was that.

The justification for killing the famous two remains
the same justification used for killing any criminals
-- for only in hindsight was their innocence
determined. Should the accidental killing of one
innocent person in the name of justice today be
considered less of a moral crime than those inherent
in the legal executions of Christ, or Socrates?

For me, the honourable way in which these individuals
faced their executions at the hands of insufferably
righteous fools casts into eternal doubt and dishonour
the argument that execution can ever be the state's
proper prerogative. In that context, executing people
for crimes committed as children seems particularly
odious and indefensible. 

Just as there are no half measures in an execution,
there's no grey zone in the death penalty debate. Like
it or not, those who believe that killing people is an
appropriate judicial process choose to ally themselves
with those who approved the death penalty for
Socrates, Christ and with those who conducted "legal"
executions in Iraq. Likewise, those who brutalize
juvenile offenders in the U.S. place themselves on the
same side as those who do so in Iraq.

For me, the ethically impoverished eye-for-an-eye
principle cannot be reconciled with civilized attempts
to make the world a better, more humane place. The
state, which is valuable only as a collective
aspiration toward what is best in human conduct, has
no place behaving in a primitive, vengeful fashion,
torturing people by keeping them on death row for
decades and then snuffing out their lives as casually
as one turns out the light.

Yet last September, one dismayed Texas judge chose his
words carefully in criticizing the state judicial
system of which he'd been a part for more than 30
years. He used the "a spirit of vengeance" to describe
the court's treatment of mentally ill offenders.

The month before that, four U.S. Supreme Court
justices said that the American practice of executing
juvenile offenders is "shameful." They said "executing
such offenders is a relic of the past and is
inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a
civilized society."

We all might do well to think about that notion of
decency amid the jingoistic clamour to condemn Iraq's
evil regime. By all means, let us have no illusions
about Saddam. But let's harbour none about ourselves,
either.

shume at islandnet.com

© Copyright  2003 Vancouver Sun


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