Maybe you already knew this, but I didn't. The United States is the ONLY country left on the planet that executes persons for crimes they committed as juveniles. Not a single other country does this. Not one. The last juvenile executed anywhere outside of the United States was in 1997.

There are several treaties that ban juvenile executions, but the United States either hasn't ratified them (sound familiar?) or in the one case where an agreement was ratified, exempted itself from the provisions that dealt with executing juvenile offenders. Boy, if you are an American doesn’t it make you proud to know that your State Department is all over that juvenile execution thing? That has to be the most morally repugnant act of U.S. diplomacy since the ill-fated finagling to have Pol Pot recognized as the leader of Cambodia.

In this decade, half of the executions of juvenile offenders were in Texas. Since 1973, there have been 13 juvenile offenders who were executed, and seven took place in Texas. I guess that shouldn't come as any big surprise when you consider that Texas accounts for one-third of all executions since 1976. So the United States is the only country left that will even execute someone for a crime they committed as a juvenile. And within the United States, only a few States carry out such executions. The last such execution was in Oklahoma last February.

What bothers me is the haphazardness of it. You are a young man of 17 and you commit a crime. Maybe you murder someone. Maybe you are just standing around when somebody you are with commits a murder. What happens to you next depends entirely on where the crime was committed.

In any country in the world, you could expect at most a long prison term. In most States you would get a long jail term. But in some States you would be put to death. It's not about the morality of the death penalty. Personally, I have no problem with it under certain conditions. But I do have a problem with the dueness of the process.

Most people think of the United States as a country, which it is. But the United States is also a federation of 50 separate states. The Constitution assigns specific areas of responsibility to the central government. Everything else is pretty much left up to the states, each of which can set its own rules on a variety of matters ranging from environmental controls to taxes to criminal penalties.

At the same time, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence grant to EACH citizen certain inalienable rights and a guarantee of due process under the law. When you stop and think about it, there is a fundamental contradiction between granting the separate States the right to go their own way while promising to ALL citizens that they will be treated equally under the law.

The criminal justice system is an area where this contradiction is often extreme. The same crime committed under identical circumstances results in wildly differing punishments depending on where the crime was committed. That might have been okay when nobody moved around much, but these days, people are constantly on the go. Many people are born in one part of the country and may spend our adult lives in many different States.

With this exposure to different parts of the country comes a better understanding of just how different the laws are throughout the country. And at some point you begin to ask, why is it that way? Why shouldn't punishment fit the crime no matter where it is committed if it is in the same country?

In a lot of ways, these same questions about the nature of statehood were at the heart of the demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO). Various groups from environmentalists to animal rights activists to labor unions came together in Seattle to ask some hard questions.

Why should workers in the United States have to compete against products produced by underpaid and under-protected workers in other countries? Shouldn’t workers in every country have the same right to form unions, the same protections against child labor, the same environmental and worker health protections? Should I not expect-no-demand that these conditions be the same if we are to compete?

The same process was at work in both instances. People in the United States began to move around a lot starting after World War II. All that moving around shook Americans out of their regional allegiances. At the same time, television came along to forge a new national brand, America. It did so by bringing Americans all together every evening in their living rooms so that they could see with their own eyes what was going on.

The ‘outside agitators’ of the Civil Rights Movement traveled to the South in part because of what they saw and heard on the television, vivid images of white sheriffs turning loose dogs on black children. Another child, running naked down a road, her eyes wide from horror and despair and pain, made America stop and ask itself what are we doing in Viet Nam. The media let us bear witness. It gave citizens the knowledge and the power to question the very basis for our being in Southeast Asia.

The same process that has been seen in the United Sates is now happening on a global level. The old ideas of sovereignty are starting to bend in the face of the revolution in instant communications. Before, we could only read about events in far-away countries. Then we could see it on television. Now, we can use e-mail and cell phones and the Internet to keep track of virtually anything, anywhere, anytime.

And as we are able to poke deeper and deeper into the ‘internal’ affairs of nations, we are beginning to ask them some hard questions about what is going on. We are a global village, and the media is what brings it all together. No place on the planet is hidden from the cameras and cell phones and Internet web sites that poke and prod into every corner.

Marshall McLuhan’s media WAS the message and it has changed the way we see the world and that in turn has changed our perceptions of what is fair and not fair. Nations and corporations can no longer hide behind the shield of sovereignty.

So when a group of finance ministers come together to cut some deals on ‘free’ trade, they find themselves confronting a whole new set of agenda items. If they think that business as usual is going to be business as usual, they have another thing coming.

There is a whole new generation of ‘outside agitators’ who want to have their voices heard, their values reflected. The powers that be may not like it, but they are absolutely going to have to deal with it.

Copyright © 2000 G.J. Lau All Rights Reserved

Check out G.J. Lau’s webzine Singleminded at: http://www.singmind.com/singleminded/