The Foreign Service Journal, October 2003

gave him grief for coming from that horrible United States of America, where those barbar- ians still practice the death penalty. As his experience suggests, the usual tack of America’s anti- death penalty advocates and their foreign allies is to play the “shame on you” game. Consider this blurb taken from the Web site w ww.derechos.org: “At the dawn of the 21st cen- tury, the death penalty is consid- ered by most civilized nations as a cruel and inhuman punishment. It has been abolished de jure or de facto by 106 nations (and) 30 countries have abolished it since 1990. However, the death penalty continues to be commonly applied in other nations. China, the Democratic Republic of (the) Congo, the United States and Iran are the most prolific executioners in the world. Indeed, the U.S. is one of six countries (including also Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) which execute people who were under 18 years old at the time they committed their crimes” [my italics]. Two things stand out from that piece of propagan- da. The first is the not-so-subtle implication that some Third World countries are still not civilized, and that Americans are on the level of those barbarians in places like China, the Congo, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. who still practice capital punishment. It’s a veiled form of racism that the folks who claim America’s death penalty is so racist haven’t noticed yet, probably because of the laughable belief that all racism in the United States comes from the right side of the politi- cal spectrum. The second observation is that the claim that the United States executes people who were juveniles when they committed cold-blooded murder is just plain wrong. Some states in America do. Some don’t. A Matter for the States According to the Web site w ww.deathpenaltyinfo.org, som e 38 states in America have death penalty statutes (as of April 1, 2001), though the categories of criminals who are eligible for the death penalty vary from state to state. Of those 38 death penalty states, six — Connecticut, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and South Dakota — haven’t executed any- one since 1976. Maryland, my home state, bans exe- cuting those under 18 no matter how heinous their crimes. Just south of here, in Virginia, juveniles as young as 16 can be executed. That’s why some conservatives (though not nearly enough for my liking) were appalled when U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who claims to sup- port states’ rights, arranged for Lee Boyd Malvo — the sniper suspect alleged to have murdered and terrified Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. residents in late 2002 — to be whisked from custody in Maryland (where he was captured) and handed over to Virginia authorities, where he could be executed despite his age. Mind you, if Malvo is found guilty, I’d have no problem seeing him executed. Yes, he was 17 when the crimes were committed. But that’s an age at which you clearly know right from wrong and, if you’re in a courtroom before a judge, you should have a reason- able understanding of your rights. The notion that being 17 or 16 or 15 somehow, in and of itself, makes you incompetent to stand trial is a fantasy our foreign friends, and their American sympathizers, should abandon. My gripe with Ashcroft is that he clearly violated Maryland’s right to try and convict Malvo. True, Malvo can’t be executed here, but I’d rather live with a Malvo locked up for the rest of his life than with a federal government clearly overstepping its boundaries to bum-rush a defendant to the execution chamber. F O C U S 40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 3 Greg Kane teaches journalism at The Johns Hopkins University and is a columnist for the Baltimore Sun. He’s a two-time winner of the Headliner’s Award and, along with Sun reporter Gilbert Lewthwaite, was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about slavery in the Sudan. Kane and Lewthwaite also won the Overseas Press Club Award and the Times Mirror Journalist of the Year Award for the same series. The usual tack of America’s anti-death penalty advocates and their foreign allies is to play the “shame on you” game.