Many Ways, Was Too Small for the Chair,” Washington Post (September 15, 1985).
22 Despite appeals from the NAACP … Bruck, “Executing Teen Killers Again.”
23 Witnesses to the execution … Bruck, “Executing Teen Killers Again.”
24 Recently, an effort has been launched … George Stinney’s family members are now seeking a new trial or exoneration for Stinney through the court system. Hearings were held in a South Carolina court in January 2014. Alan Blinder, “Family of South Carolina Boy Put to Death Seeks Exoneration 70 Years Later,” New York Times (January 22, 2014); Eliott C. McLaughlin, “New Trial Sought for George Stinney, Executed at 14,” CNN (January 23, 2014).
25 Influential criminologists predicted …“Super-predator” language was commonly used in conjunction with dire predictions that a vast increase in violent juvenile crime was occurring or about to occur. See Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice, “Juvenile Justice: A Century of Change” (1999), 4–5, available at ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/178993.pdf, accessed April 30, 2014. See, for example, Sacha Coupet, “What to Do with the Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: The Role of Rhetoric and Reality About Youth Offenders in the Constructive Dismantling of the Juvenile Justice System,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 148 (2000): 1303, 1307; Laura A. Bazelon, “Exploding the Superpredator Myth: Why Infancy Is the Preadolescent’s Best Defense in Juvenile Court,” New York University Law Review 75 (2000): 159. Much of the frightening imagery was racially coded; see, for example, John J. DiIulio, “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours,” City Journal (Spring 1996), available at city-journal.org/html/6_2_my_black.html, accessed April 30, 2014 (“270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990, coming at us in waves over the next two decades … as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males”); William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio Jr., and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty—And How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 27–28.
26 Sometimes expressly focusing on black … John J. DiIulio Jr., “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” Weekly Standard (November 27, 1995), 23.
27 Panic over the impending crime … Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters, Body Count, 27. See also Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “Juvenile Justice.”
28 The juvenile population in America increased … See, for example, Elizabeth Becker, “As Ex-Theorist on Young ‘Superpredators,’ Bush Aide Has Regrets,” New York Times (February 9, 2001), A19.
29 In 2001, the surgeon general … U.S. Surgeon General, Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General (2001), ch. 1, available at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44297/#A12312, accessed April 30, 2014; see also U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “Challenging the Myths” (2001), 5, available at ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/178995.pdf, accessed April 30, 2014 (“[A]nalysis of juvenile homicide arrests also leads to the conclusion that juvenile superpredators are more myth than reality”).
30 We decided to publish a report …“Cruel and Unusual.”
Chapter NINE: I’M HERE
1 “Me, I can simply look”… McMillian v. Alabama, CC-87-682.60, Testimony of Ralph Myers During Rule 32 Hearing, April 16, 1992.
CHAPTER TEN: MITIGATION
1 In the 1960s and 1970s … In these decades, legislative and judicial reforms tightened the procedures by which individuals where subject to involuntary commitment. Stanley S. Herr, Stephen Arons, and Richard E. Wallace Jr., Legal Rights and Mental Health Care (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1983). In 1978, the United States Supreme Court raised the burden on states seeking to have individuals involuntarily committed to mental health hospitals from the low “preponderance of the evidence” standard to a more difficult “clear and convincing evidence” standard. Addington v. Texas, 441 U.S. 418 (1978).
2 Today, over 50 percent of prison … Doris J. James and Lauren E. Glaze, “Mental Health Problems of Prison and Jail Inmates,” Special Report, Bureau of Justice Statistics (September 2006), available at bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mhppji.pdf, accessed July 2, 2013. This number breaks down to 56 percent percent of state prisoners, 45 percent of federal prisoners, and 64 percent of local jail prisoners. In total, that accounts for an estimated 1,264,300 inmates. This study is the most comprehensive recent study available and yet was conducted in 2005, so numbers may have changed in more recent years. However, current sources (2012–13) still cite this study, so I feel comfortable concluding that it is still the most comprehensive and up-to-date source on the subject.
3 Nearly one in five prison … The category of “serious mental illness” includes schizophrenia, schizophrenia spectrum disorder, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, brief psychotic disorder, delusional disorder, and psychotic disorders not otherwise specified. This is distinguished from the more general category