Outside reading blog 1

For outside reading, I am reading a book called No Choirboy by Susan Kuklin. This book takes a deep look into American prisons as well as teenagers and other inmates on death row. The first chapter is called “ I Was a Teenager on Death Row.” Right there that jumped out at me and I was hooked. The book starts out talking about a murder of a boy named Kevin Gardner, which took place in Alabama. On the first page we meet Roy who is in the courthouse waiting for the verdict for the murder of Kevin Kuklin. The judge says, “ By the power invested in me by the State of Alabama, I hereby sentence you to die by electrocution.” This happened back in August of 1993 when teenagers were still allowed to be sentenced to death.

This first chapter is narrated by Roy and he takes the reader through his emotions. We first hear from him the courthouse when he tells us how much he was crying and screaming when the judge announced that he was going to be put to death. He talks about how scared he was going to jail when he was 16 years old and being transferred to death row. He had no idea if he was going to die in a month and didn’t know how the appeal system worked. I find this very interesting because it is so easy to connect to. Being a teenager and putting myself in his shoes, I couldn’t even start to imagine what this kid must have been going through. Whether he committed the crime or not, not knowing when your supposed to die must be the worst thing ever.  Roy brings up a good point when he says, “ I wasn’t able to join the military. I wasn’t old enough to buy liquor. Hodo d you sentence somebody that young to death?” I couldn’t agree more with that quote. Putting people on death row that are under the age of 18 is just absurd. In my opinion, capital punishment is wrong itself but I will talk about that in later posts.

The rest of the chapter describes what happened at the murder scene and how the story played out. We learn that the people Roy was with were granted full immunity if they told the truth about what happened so they had no problem pointing the finger at Roy. Roy also describes what death row is like mentally and physically. In 2005, he was taken off death row and placed in a maximum-security prison. A law was passed that said a minor cannot be sentenced to death so therefore Roy got life without parole. His case can be re-opened now and he has lawyers trying to reduce his sentence.