Word: oklahomas
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...executed six juvenile offenders this decade--more than any other country. A 1988 Supreme Court ruling (Thompson v. Oklahoma) is widely interpreted as prohibiting the execution of offenders who committed crimes when under the age of 16, but individual states can set higher minimum ages. Of the 38 states that allow the death penalty, 13 set the age at 18, four set it at age 17, and 21 have a minimum of 16 years of age or no minimum...
...about for the subject of her next book. Constant reading, a habit and passion she developed as a little girl, eventually led her to an obscure chapter in 19th century U.S. history, shortly after the Civil War: the westward emigration of former slaves into the sparsely settled territories of Oklahoma and beyond. Some found the promise of a new life in wide-open spaces, touted in numerous newspaper advertisements in the 1870s, irresistible, and a challenge besides. Morrison was struck by a caveat that often appeared in those ads: "Come Prepared...
...novel opens starkly--"They shoot the white girl first"--and then coils back and forth through a century of imagined history to explain who "they" are and why, on a dewy Oklahoma morning in 1976, they felt compelled to storm a decaying mansion and wreak violence on the handful of women living within...
Morrison traces the genesis of this brutal act back to the 1870s, when nine African-American patriarchs, ex-slaves in Mississippi and Louisiana, joined together, gathered their wives and children, picking up a few strays in the process, and headed west to settle in the Oklahoma Territory. Eventually, arduously, they reach a town called Fairly, where their spokesmen appeal to the local citizens, blacks like them except with lighter skin, for permission to settle there. The Fairly leaders say no ("Come Prepared or Not at All"). This rejection will reverberate through the next hundred years of the outcasts' collective memory...
...Crisco, then having the kids sleep in a shower cap. In July a 13-year-old girl in Lorimor, Iowa, died after her mother doused her head in gasoline and a pilot light on the family's hot-water heater ignited the fumes. Last spring, a six-year-old Oklahoma girl stopped breathing temporarily after her mother's boyfriend soaked her hair in Diazinon, an agricultural insecticide. "It's a commentary on how bad the situation is," says Kramer. "Physicians are running out of things to tell people...