"The age of 18 is the point where society draws the line for many purposes between childhood and adulthood. It is, we conclude, the age at which the line for death eligibility ought to rest."
"This is a great day for teenage killers and a very dark day for the families of their victims."
Kristina Wildeveld Coneh supported executing convicted teenage killers—until she began representing them.
One case sticks with her. Kenshawn Maxey was 16 in May 1998, when he shot and killed two people during a robbery of the O'Aces Bar & Grill.
"He was robbing the bar to get money for his pregnant 14-year-old girlfriend," says Coneh, a county special public defender who dubs herself "one of the few Republicans who do criminal defense."
"His [accomplice, Lashawn Levi], who taught him how to shoot a gun, struggled with the bartender [Salvatore Zendrano Jr.]. Levi told him to shoot and he did."
Both men died.
Though the jury ruled 11-1 in favor of life without parole, Coneh saw it as a Pyrrhic victory; she couldn't fathom how any juror with knowledge of Maxey's upbringing—born to a prostitute and pimp, father imprisoned on drug charges, mother brutally murdered—could vote to kill him. "This kid was a ward of the state," she says, "and here you had the state trying to kill him."
Last Tuesday's Supreme Court decision to abolish the juvenile death penalty heartened abolitionists across the country, who've long said it was an inefficient criminal deterrent and antiquated form of punishment for an industrialized nation. (The ruling affects 72 people in 20 states, including 28-year-old Michael Domingues, sentenced to die for the 1993 murders of 24-year-old Arjin Chanel Pechpho and her 4-year-old son, Jonathan Smith, in Las Vegas. He was one of three juvenile offenders ever placed on Nevada's death row.)
The ruling comes just two days after police arrested 18-year-old Abram Madrid and two male juveniles on charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the February 12 shooting of Manuel Mora. Madrid was booked into the North Las Vegas Detention Center; his accomplices are confined in the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center. A corrections officer inside the juvenile detention unit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, predicted the Supreme Court ruling will embolden youth to commit even more heinous crimes. "They're already killers and ain't afraid of prison," the source says. "We have about 12 kids right now with murder charges. And now they know that you can't kill them for their crimes."
Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a nonprofit public-policy research organization, and calls the ruling "a fiasco of a decision with deleterious results ... no question about it."
Burnett envisions drug dealers using more youths as couriers and instruments of their violent intentions. "Historically, drug dealers have used young people to hold their drugs, telling them they would only go to the juvenile system, and it's not that bad. This [decision] will certainly embolden some juvenile predators. Whatever restraint they had with regard to the death penalty will no longer be there."
Burnett contends that death-penalty states already had provisions in their laws allowing leeway in meting out death sentences—leniency on mentally disabled juveniles and those who truly didn't understand their actions—so the Supreme Court didn't need to interject. Expect the ruling to be challenged frequently, he says, and to be changed if President Bush can muscle conservative justices to fill upcoming Supreme Court vacancies.
"I'm not convinced this ruling will stand very long," Burnett says. "The court's decision was ludicrous. The Supreme Court was just wrong when it said the majority of states don't condone juvenile death penalty. Fifty-two percent of states that had the death penalty allowed for the execution of juveniles."
The DA's quote—"a great day for teenage killers and a very dark day for the families of their victims"—riles David Eliot, communications director for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Not all relatives of crime victims support the death penalty, he argues, nor is there evidence that death sentences deter crime. He finds such comments irresponsible and injurious.
"Life in prison without parole is a pretty harsh punishment. ... You never walk freely again ... it's a dreary existence," Eliot says. He dismisses opponents' reactions as knee-jerk, tough-on-crime posturing. "The sky didn't fall when the death penalty was abolished for those with mental retardation in 2002, nor will it now. We're talking about an incredibly small population here. There've been 22 juvenile executions in the last 25 years. There are 72 youth on death row nationally. The United States executes 60 people a year. There are some 60,000 murders nationally each year. This is not a big issue. This is not a public-safety issue. We're not going to see a spike in murders."
All it took was spending time with a condemned juvenile to change Coneh's mind about the ultimate punishment.
"You can't spend time with a juvenile offender and still be in favor of the death penalty ... there'd be no way you would convict, say, a 14-year-old kid of murder ... they live in their own world, enrapt with their juvenile mentality," she says. "I wonder if these people ever met the kids who commit these crimes. These aren't straight-A students."
As long as states could execute juveniles, Coneh says, America was on par with oppressive regions in the Middle East and Africa. "We were in the same category as kids raising terrorists."
Burnett counters that acceding to global pressure to change isn't a good way to govern or set policy. "So what if the Supreme Court looked at world opinion and UN laws? It's only supposed to look at the Constitution," he says. "They [juvenile death-penalty opponents] say they are concerned about humanity. What about the humanity of the victims? If a person commits murder when he's 17 and another commits murder when he's 18, why should one or two days difference make a difference."
And Nevada's still not done with the issue of subjecting juveniles to adult punishment. Still on the books is a law that places anyone charged with murder in the adult system. Legally, an 8-year-old murderer can be imprisoned with grown-ups. "Luckily," says Coneh, who's crusaded to get the law changed, "we've never had an 8-year-old commit murder."