by Kerry Jacoby

Created on: March 22, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

This is rather an odd question, that could be taken two ways, so I will respond to both possibilities.

If the actual question is meant to be "should children who commit crimes be put to death," I would have to say that it depends on the crime and on the child. (I am going to assume throughout this article that we are talking about crimes that would actually incur the death penalty, not just any crimes). A child who acts as an adult, with the same cold-blooded psychopathy as an adult offender should, if convicted of a capital crime, pay the ultimate price. A child who makes an error of judgment or causes a tragic accident should not.

If the question is "Should adults who commit offenses against children be put to death," I believe that the answer is, generally, yes. However, I would restrict the capital offense to deliberate acts of premeditated and malicious conduct, not mere "bad parenting" or discipline. There are plenty of cases in the news every day of perverse and psychotic adults indulging their sicknesses with children to keep the judicial system busy for a hundred years. There is no need to persecute people for the way they happen to be raising their children (as in cases where children are taken away on the single report of a vicious neighbor or family member.)

The other day, on the news website, I found ten different stories of adults deliberately harming children. A grandmother sold her grandchild to a pedophile for sex in exchange for cigarettes and some cash. A man in Indianapolis stabbed his baby son in the back and threw him out the car window. John Couey was convicted of raping, killing and burying alive Jessica Lunsford. A woman and her boyfriend were convicted of offering her children on the Internet for sex. A woman and her boyfriend were convicted of training her female children to have sex. It seems to go on forever.

There is no way to stop this onslaught against children if the law has no teeth. It is bad enough that the Internet offers a multitude of possibilities for pedophiles to find children to predate on-let us at least give the law the power to remove them completely from the threat of doing more harm once a perpetrator is finally convicted.

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