No Choirboy: Murder, Violence, and Teenagers on Death Row

Content Warning: This section references violence, sexual assault, and racism.

Over a century ago, the United States established a separate criminal justice system for juvenile offenders, offering penalties considerably less harsh than those reserved for adults. Nevertheless, since the (perceived) escalation of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, juveniles have frequently been tried as adults for certain crimes. According to the Juvenile Law Center, this practice intensified in the 1990s, “in the wake of a baseless and racist myth that a generation of ‘super-predators’ was on the rise” (“Youth Tried as Adults.” Juvenile Law Center, 2022). Such prosecutions had much less to do with science or child psychology than with public fear, much of it whipped up by questionable news sources such as tabloids.

Coalition for Juvenile Justice estimates that, despite a decades-long decrease in violent crime, 200,000 youths are tried, sentenced, or incarcerated as adults in the United States every year (“Policy Position 12: Keep Youth Out of Adult Courts, Jails, and Prisons.” Coalition for Juvenile Justice). This policy subjects children as young as 11 to the long sentences, limited privileges, and harsh punishments conceived originally for adult offenders, as well as leaving them vulnerable to rape and other violence at the hands of older prisoners. Kuklin’s interviews with Mark Melvin and Nanon Williams speak particularly to the trauma of adolescents housed with adult prisoners. Both were subjected to violence, including threats of sexual assault, and both cultivated a reputation for dangerousness to protect themselves. Mark and Nanon ultimately grew significantly while in prison, becoming more reflective and compassionate, but the methods they initially used to cope with their imprisonment suggest that other incarcerated youths might go in the opposite direction, hardening in response to their environment.

A disproportionate number of the adolescents prosecuted as adults are people of color. This partly reflects the reality that Americans of color are more likely to live in low-income communities. For a variety of reasons, ranging from lack of opportunity to uneven application of the law, people in poverty are more likely to end up incarcerated independent of race (as demonstrated by the case of white teenager Mark, who grew up on welfare without access to behavioral therapy or psychiatric care). However, the disparity also reflects systemic racism within the criminal justice system. In 1983, David C. Baldus, a University of Iowa professor of law, published a study of 2,000 murder trials that examined the correlation between racial bias and death penalty sentencing. The study considered the races of both victims and defendants in these cases, all of whom were tried in Georgia in the 1970s, and its conclusions were striking: Baldus found that defendants charged with murdering white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive the death penalty than those charged with murdering Black people. He also found that Black defendants were more likely to receive the death penalty than white defendants, regardless of the victim’s race (Baldus, David C., Charles Pulaski, and George Woodworth. “Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 74, no. 3, 1983, pp. 661-773).

In No Choirboy, Napoleon Beazley’s story serves as a case study regarding Race, Injustice, and Capital Punishment. Given his background—a good student with no criminal record—it seems probable that his race factored significantly into his sentencing (one juror is alleged to have referred to him using a racial slur). As in Baldus’s study, the identity of the victim also mattered; the murdered man was not only white but affluent and exceptionally well-connected. Race might also have influenced the convictions of Nanon and Roy, who both maintain they did not even commit the murders for which they were prosecuted. The ACLU estimates that since 1973, over 156 people have been released from death rows in the United States because their convictions were overturned on appeal (“The Case Against the Death Penalty.” American Civil Liberties Union, 2023). This represents about one person for every 10 who are executed. The inescapable conclusion is that at least some of the people put to death in the United States have been innocent.