I thought only convicted murderers could be sentenced to death in the United States. But right now two men sit on death row, both in Louisiana, neither of whom has been accused of killing anyone. What they are both guilty of is raping children, and the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear arguments as to whether or not the death penalty in these cases is constitutional.
Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that rapists of adults couldn't be put to death, Louisiana isn't the only state that has legalized this punishment for child rapists: Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas will also be awaiting the Court's decision in the case of Patrick Kennedy, who was sentenced to death after being convicted of violently raping his five-year-old stepdaughter. But Kennedy has some surprising allies - including victims' rights groups, who fear that attackers will have no reason not to kill their young victims if the penalty for both crimes is the same.
At first I balked at the idea of extending the death penalty (towards which I already hold a great deal of ambivalence) to crimes not involving murder, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Although I'm sympathetic to the concerns of the victims' rights groups, I believe the death penalty should be reserved exclusively for criminals who would pose the greatest risk to the public should they ever be released. And pedophiles are notoriously difficult to rehabilitate. Virtually every famous example of a fatal, sexual attack on a child (such as John Couey's murder of Jessica Lunsford and Alejandro Avila's murder of Samantha Runnion) involved a pedophile who had previously been accused (often multiple times) of committing more minor sexual acts against children. I would be much more afraid of a convicted child rapist moving into the neighborhood than I would a parolee who had been convicted of shooting a convenience store clerk during a robbery twenty years ago while high on crack. And I'm not the only one. While many states have a version of "Megan's Law," which requires released sex offenders to register with local governments, I haven't heard of one state that requires this of paroled murderers.
Because let's face it, children are the most cherished, most vulnerable members of our society. And if putting child rapists to death gives any additional protection to the group that needs it most, maybe that's what we should do.
