American Civil Liberties Union

We as a nation need to stop throwing away our children. Kids are still maturing and developing — as I like to say, they are not done yet. As a result, society treats kids and adults differently in a wide array of contexts: kids cannot drive, sit on juries, enter contracts, join the military, smoke, drink, marry or hold political office. Yet we lock them up and literally throw away the key.  Making matters worse, we condemn black youth forever at 18 times the rate of white youth and Latino youth at five times the rate of whites.

After his sister's death in the September 11 attacks at the World Trade Center, once-avowed white supremacist Mark Stroman shot and killed Waqar Hasan, who was Pakistani, and Vasudev Patel, an Indian immigrant, during a series of convenience store and gas station rampages in Texas. Rais Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi Muslim man, was also shot and partially blinded by Stroman, who shot the men to vent his anti-Arab sentiment. Stroman was convicted of murder and awaits his execution by the state of Texas, scheduled for next week, on July 20.

When I was a child, my cousin was brutally murdered. As far as our family knows, the police never found his killer.

A few years later, another cousin of mine was murdered in prison. His killers were in cahoots with his jailers, so none of them was ever prosecuted.

No one received the death penalty for these murders, and as a beloved family member of murder victims, I would never have supported pursuing capital punishment in either case.

As legislators in Connecticut grapple with a bill that would abolish the death penalty in the state, murder victims ' families are speaking loudly about their opposition to Connecticut's capital punishment system . There is a tension. On one hand, victims' family members need finality and an end to reliving their loved one's horrible death in the media and the courts. But that kind of finality is not immediate, because the Constitution requires due process, effective counsel, and protection against wrongful conviction for those sentenced to death. The years of legal appeals before an execution extend and exacerbate murder victims' families' suffering.

Recent news reports suggest that Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of leaking government files to Wikileaks, is being held by our government — alone, often naked, in a small isolation cell for months at a time as he awaits legal proceedings to commence against him. Many Americans are appalled by the thought of this kind of treatment. While it appears these confinement conditions serve no purpose other than to degrade Pfc. Manning and break his spirit, they provide an important opportunity for the nation to reflect on the deeply damaging impact of solitary confinement.