Death Penalty: Delara Darabi

Delara Darabi, a 23-year-old Iranian woman, was executed Friday. She had confessed to a murder when she was 17, but later recanted. She said that her boyfriend, who was 19 at the time, had convinced her to confess. They thought that she wouldn't be executed, since she was a minor. He is currently serving 10 years for his part in the murder. She was executed alone; neither her family nor her lawyer were informed, although notifying them is her right per Iraqi law.

Is executing juvenile offenders ever right? This is a separate question to whether the death penalty is ever right, I think; does the government have a greater obligation to give juvenlies a second chance than it does to extend the same to adults? If the government structures its laws around the idea that minors and children cannot be held to the same expectations of impulse control and decisonmaking skills that society expects of adults, then yes. A government that does not recognize a minor as a full adult cannot justly punish a minor when she fails to act with the good judgment required of a full adult.

Some critics might contend that 17 and 18 years of age are not meaningfully different in terms of developmental ability. That might be true, and surely it varies among people. However, once the government has decided that 18 years of age is a meaningful proxy for good decisionmaking and sufficient life experience, the government is bound by that proxy. 17 is different than 18, even when it's not, because the government says so. Therefore the government can't justly expect a certain level of responsibility from 17 year olds in all but one context, when that single outlier context is the one in which the government intrudes upon the very life of that person. It is impermissible for the government's inconsistency to result in the ultimate imposition of the state upon the citizen.

This line of analysis might also be meaningful in a women's right context, especially in a legal system that singles women out as dependents of men. In Iran several laws require that men act as providers and represetatives for women: women can't get a passport without their husbands' permission,

they are barred from certain professions, and a woman's life is considered to be worth half of a man's life. These laws suggest that a woman cannot take care of herself. She is inferior in every way to a man, lacking self-control and the ability to function in the world. Any legitimate government, in refusing to confer upon a segment of society the rights and responsibilities of its fully-functioning members, must similarly refuse to punish that segment for failing to exhibit those rights and responsibilities. In other words, in a legitimate society, the government can't have it both ways: either I'm an adult with full rights and control over my actions, and therefore culpable for my sins, or I'm not, and I'm not.

Iran executes more juveniles than any other country, even though it has joined the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits executing people whose crime was committed before their eighteenth birthday.

So let's turn to a free society, for comparison. In the US, we executed juvelines in 19 states until 2005. We executed those with mental impairments until 2002.