56 pages • 1 hour read
Susan KuklinNo Choirboy: Murder, Violence, and Teenagers on Death Row
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Race, Injustice, and Capital Punishment
Content Warning: This section contains references to violence, sexual assault, and racism.
The cases described in Kuklin’s book suggest that racial bias has not ceased to be a significant factor in capital cases in the years since Baldus’s 1983 study, at least in the American South. In capital murder trials, the judge or jury must consider “mitigating evidence” in determining a sentence; typically, this includes the defendant’s background, such as the lack of a criminal record. Napoleon, who was executed in Texas in 2002 for the murder of a white businessman, was an honor student with no criminal record at the time of his arrest. Nanon Williams, sentenced to death in Texas in 1992, also showed immense promise, making the Junior Olympics in track, the All-State soccer team, and All-Star Little League Baseball; he was being scouted by universities for football a year or two before his arrest. The extreme youth of the three Black defendants Kuklin profiles—Nanon and Napoleon were both 17 at the time of their arrests, while Roy was 16—should also have been mitigating factors. Nevertheless, all three received the death penalty.
The probability of racial bias in the sentencing process does not even take into account the role played by race in the trial itself. Defendants of color have historically been, in the words of Stevenson, “horribly represented,” and thus end up on death row primarily because “they are poor and they are black” (186). Napoleon’s case also suggests possible racial prejudice on the part of some jurors; in fact, his lawyer believed the selection process was itself racially biased.
Though focused primarily on those who have already been convicted of crimes, No Choirboy also alludes to the role that systemic racism can play in setting young people up for run-ins with the law. The intersection of race and class is particularly salient; poverty itself is a risk factor for crime, and people of color are disproportionately likely to live in low-income communities. Nanon attributes his involvement in drug-dealing partly to the environment in which he lived, though not merely due to lack of opportunity. Rather, he admired those who provided for their families by engaging in drug-dealing, sex work, etc., because he had so few Black role models; he did not learn about famous figures in African American history until he was in prison.
Racial inequity exists throughout the breadth of the justice system, not just for capital crimes. However, No Choirboy suggests that the death penalty, by its very nature, curtails the chances of reversing a miscarriage of justice. In 2005, the Supreme Court finally struck down the death penalty for juveniles in Roper v. Simmons, but the decision came too late for Napoleon, who was executed three years earlier.
Trying Juveniles as Adults
All four of the incarcerated youths profiled in No Choirboy were juveniles (under the age of 18) at the time of their arrest; one, Mark, was only 14. Although Nanon and Napoleon were both 17, and therefore juveniles, both were automatically tried as adults, due to Texas’s particularly stringent designation of juvenile offenders as 16 and younger. Of the four, only Melvin was spared the death penalty at his initial sentencing.
Science has identified numerous developmental differences between juveniles and adults, particularly within the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for planning, prioritizing, and impulse control—which is not fully developed until age 25. Consequently, teens are more susceptible to high-risk behavior and less likely to consider the consequences of their actions. For these reasons and others, the US Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that juveniles are less culpable for their actions than adult offenders, as well as more amenable to change and rehabilitation as they mature. Juvenile detention, which places greater emphasis on rehabilitation than adult prisons, offers the best chance for this. As Stevenson notes:
That’s what’s so remarkable about kids. They grow up. The person you represent in the beginning is very different than the person you are representing a year later. […] Each time it is a different person, more so than with adults. These changes are profound (25).
Stevenson (and, implicitly, Kuklin) suggests that the rigid policy of sentencing juveniles like Roy, Nanon, and Napoleon to death or life without the possibility of parole ignores everything science and personal experience suggest about the resiliency and potential of the teenage mind and personality.
Juveniles’ lack of impulse control and their relative failure to prioritize their long-term interests also put them at a severe disadvantage during police investigations. Studies suggest that many juveniles (e.g., the Central Park Five) offer false confessions to police merely to end the stress of a lengthy interrogation. Roy, for instance, testified in court that he lied in his confession just so the police “would leave [him] alone” (17). Kuklin’s book diagrams the many ways in which naive juveniles with limited experience of crime and punishment can easily be outfoxed not only by the police but by older, savvier accomplices. Such accomplices may coerce and mislead them only to testify against them in court in exchange for partial, or even total, immunity. Three of the four young men Kuklin profiles—Roy, Mark, and Nanon—experienced variations on this. The fourth, Napoleon, was convicted partly on the testimony of accomplices his own age, and his brother believes his actions might have stemmed from peer pressure (something that adolescents are, again, uniquely susceptible to).
Finally, the stories Kuklin documents suggest that a maximum-security prison can be a far more dangerous and demoralizing place for a juvenile than for an adult; some argue that it exemplifies the “cruel and unusual punishment” banned by the Eighth Amendment. Several passages in Kuklin’s book document the sexual menace experienced by her interviewees during their first years in adult detention, where older, stronger inmates vastly outnumbered them. Sixteen-year-old Mark, for instance, was beaten numerous times by would-be rapists and had to follow a rigid routine to avoid sexual assault: As soon as an officer unlocked his cell, he would rush out before the other inmates could corner him. He even resorted to booby-trapping his cell. Eventually, he asked to be put in protective custody, but he was told by the captain of the guards to “grow up and be a man” (55). Nanon, who also lived in fear of rape and beatings, observes, “I knew that this was no place for a boy” (107).
Death and Mourning
In 1994, when Roy heard the judge sentence him to death for capital murder, he thought he had only a few weeks to live. Two guards had to pick him up and carry him bodily to the squad car outside because he was screaming in terror. As he later told Kuklin, “I didn’t understand what the appeals process was about” (4).
Not since the first half of the 20th century have convicts in the United States been executed within a few weeks of their sentencing. Nanon tells how condemned prisoners are assigned a “death number” based on the order in which they came to death row: “They try to kill you in that order” (90). The vagaries of the appeals process complicate this mechanized approach, but condemned prisoners like Nanon have a visceral sense of the “death numbers” ticking down toward their own. The wait to die can be particularly harrowing to those sentenced in their teens, who may feel that they never really had an opportunity to live. As Roy says, “I don’t want to die in some prison cell. I want to see a beach. I’ve been out of Alabama one time. […] I was just learning to drive” (34).
The Damocles’ sword of an impending execution, with its stays, appeals, and other uncertainties, has invited comparisons to long-term diseases such as cancer, which may similarly raise false hopes of a reprieve. Kuklin chronicles the “ecstatic” reaction of Napoleon’s family when he was granted a last-minute stay in August 2001, only to note that he was executed nine months later. As Napoleon told his family little about the crime for which he was convicted, this execution also foreclosed any possibility of understanding his actions. Since his involvement in such an uncharacteristic act was a trauma in and of itself, this lack of closure weighed heavily on his family—particularly his brother, Jamaal.
Kuklin also explores this lack of closure from the other side in her discussion of the Jenkins family. However, where the Beazleys’ yearslong vigil for Napoleon served as a sort of mourning-in-advance, preparing them for the worst and permitting them to exchange parting words with Napoleon, William Jenkins’s death came as a complete shock. Dying at age 16 in a botched robbery on his second day at his new job, William was taken from his parents and two siblings so suddenly and pointlessly that, in the words of his sister Mary, it had the unreality and horror of “a dream” (158). Consequently, a great deal remained unsaid and unshared, leaving his relatives feeling deprived and diminished. William’s sister, for instance, fell into a long depression. Both Jenkins siblings wore William’s old clothes, and Mary took up some of his interests, such as the guitar, while bitterly mourning the longed-for bond she never got to share with him.
Despite the differences between the two families’ grief, Kuklin suggests they have more in common than not. Paul’s remarks about “instinctively” walling off his emotions to spare himself more pain recall the words of Napoleon’s brother Jamaal, who observed that “Love will tear you apart. Love will hurt your soul” (133). All too aware of the heartbreak of losing a loved one to murder, the Jenkinses are firmly against capital punishment.
