Kill
the boy? Yes or no?
Yahoo!News
By James J. Kilpatrick
Tue Apr 25, 7:03 PM ET
Suppose we talk today about the murder of Melissa Mills and the trial
of Renaldo Adams. An ugly crime has led to a troublesome sentence.
This is undisputed: In Montgomery, Ala., a little before 11 o'clock on
the night of Aug. 20, 1997, Adams burst into the home of the Andrew
Mills family. Mills had dropped off to sleep in the living room. His
pregnant wife, "Missy," and their three young children were asleep in
their rooms.
Adams threatened Mills with a boning knife, robbed him of what cash he
had on hand, and stupidly ordered him to go to an automatic banking
machine and get some more. As soon as Mills left, Adams raped his wife,
stabbed her repeatedly and killed her unborn child. Mills soon returned
with police. Missy Mills died that night of massive wounds to her neck,
liver and lungs. An Alabama jury found Adams guilty of murder in the
first degree and voted 10-2 for his execution.
Those are the facts. This is another fact: At the time of the crime in
1997, Adams was 17 years and 2 months old.
The usual appeals ensued. In 2003 the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals
affirmed the death sentence. Then the case languished while the U.S.
Supreme Court heard argument and pondered the similar case of young
Christopher Simmons in Missouri. He too had been sentenced to death for
murder. On March 1 a year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court set aside
Simmons' sentence with a sweeping decree: Persons under the age of 18
may no longer be sentenced to death in the United States. Such
punishment has become "cruel and unusual" under the Constitution.
The facts in the case of Christopher Simmons were as appalling as the
facts in the case of Renaldo Adams. Young Simmons and an accomplice
kidnapped Shirley Crook in the middle of the night, bound her in duct
tape, and threw her into the Meramec River a few miles south of St.
Louis. They killed her for the fun of it, after boasting that they
would never be punished because they were only 17. The accomplice
turned state's evidence. Simmons was sentenced to death.
Missouri's Supreme Court, after first affirming, reversed itself in
2003 and the case went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. There it led to
the high court's 5-4 decision a year ago in which Justice Anthony
Kennedy laid down the new rule on capital punishment: In a warmly
concurring opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens praised the alternative
life sentence as a manifestation of the court's "evolving standards of
decency."
Kennedy's opinion drew strong criticism as an unwarranted piece of
judicial activism. Writing in The New Republic, professor Jeffrey Rosen
called it "careless," "embarrassing," "analytically sloppy and glib."
Within the court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor strongly dissented.
Justice Antonin Scalia delivered a withering dissent: Kennedy's
reasoning, said Scalia, was "astounding," "implausible," a "mockery" of
the first principles of jurisprudence.
We will learn shortly if the Supreme Court is willing to plunge back
into the thicket created by its opinion in the Simmons case. Since that
was decided a year ago, Chief Justice William Rehnquist has died and
Justice O'Connor has retired. The changes have brought a new chief
justice, John G. Roberts, and a new associate justice, Samuel Alito.
For good or ill, an old rule may govern the outcome: The more things
change, the more they stay the same.
Alabama's attorney general, Troy King, has filed a persuasive petition
in the pending Adams case. "There is no principled basis," he contends,
"for concluding that 17-year-old murderers, as a class, are
categorically incapable of acting with a degree of moral culpability
deserving of society's severest punishment." He concedes that some
youths are not capable. But others most assuredly are -- and if
sentencing "is to have any mooring in reality, culpability must be
assessed on an individualized basis."
This strikes me as a sound view of human behavior. More to the point,
it suggests a sound course to be pursued in appraising the court's leap
to constitutional judgment. There is no massive, demonstrable rush
among the states to lower the minimum age at which juveniles are exempt
from capital punishment. It is a time for the states to make haste
slowly.
In his majority opinion for the court a year ago in the Simmons case,
Justice Kennedy intrepidly asserted, "A line must be drawn." So he drew
it at the age of 18. My own thought is that if a new line must be
drawn, let the states draw it one by one.