Word: rowe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cousin, who is black, is one of 63 juvenile offenders on death row in prisons around the U.S. Two-thirds of this group are minorities, and two-thirds of their alleged victims were white. "What that tells me," says Steven Hawkins, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, "is that while we as a society are willing to give second chances to white children, that understanding gets lost when it comes to black or Latino kids...
Cousin has been in jail for more than two years, and a few weeks ago, he marked his 19th birthday behind bars. He had little to celebrate. He's on death row at Louisiana State Prison at Angola, a former plantation turned high-security prison that was made infamous by the movie Dead Man Walking. Cousin's cell is small and stark, with cement floors, a metal sleeping bunk and a squat, steel toilet. He is locked in his cell 23 hours a day, with a one-hour break to exercise or use the telephone. Meals are pushed through...
...KIDS ON THE ROW...
...death penalty is typically regarded as the last resort of justice. We expect men and women on death row to be men and women--career criminals with hardened hearts and calloused souls, past adolescence and beyond redemption, with long rap sheets and a slimy-slug trail of inflicted suffering. But that's not always the case. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that executes juvenile offenders: criminals whose alleged offenses were committed when they were under the age of 18. There are only six countries in the world that are known to have executed juvenile...
...addition to the racial imbalance of the death-row population that Hawkins cites, experts say juvenile offenders on death row are often the victims of recent, horrible child abuse. The case of Robert Anthony Carter, a child of abuse who was put on death row in Texas 15 years ago for crimes he allegedly committed when he was 17 years old, is not atypical. Carter, who is black, grew up in a Houston housing project and was routinely taunted and beaten by other children because his clothes were ragged and dirty. His mother and stepfather would thrash Robert...