Post #2 - Charlie's Story - 3/11

    For this post, I’ve decided to make it more of a reflection rather than doing a required response. The most recent chapter I read from my book was a little bit of a side story when it comes to the main focus of the book. It was about Bryan Steveson’s attempt to protect a 14-year-old boy named Charlie from death row. First off, I want to point out that this boy is nearly three years younger than I am right now, placing him in middle school. Secondly, I want to reiterate the fact that this boy, or should I say child, was sentenced to death. Imagine yourself as a little 8th grader, still innocent enough where the harsh reality of the world hasn’t yet sunk in yet. Now picture yourself knowing that within the year, you would be electrocuted to death by a machine that had previously taken the lives of serial-killing adults. I feel that it is fair to say that sentencing a 14-year-old to death, no matter what the crime they committed, is outrageous.

    While Stevenson’s whole career so far in the book has been based around getting convicts, specifically black ones, off death row, this case is clearly an important one to him. He describes Charlie as weighing “less than 100 pounds and was just five feet tall.” (pg 117) This only further stresses how much of a child Charlie really is. To think that a judge, probably with kids and grandkids of his own, could look at a boy like this and declare, to his face, that he deserves to die is just mind-blowing.

    The reason why Charlie was in court to begin with is also horribly disturbing. To sum it up briefly, Charlie’s mother was dating an abusive drunk, George, who had sent her to the hospital multiple times with fairly severe injuries. One night George came home blind drunk and began fighting with Charlie’s mother. Things escalated, and George ended up knocking her unconscious. Charlie came running into the kitchen to find his mother lying in a pool of blood and barely breathing. He ran to the phone in the bedroom to call 911, but then something took over him. Stevenson wrote, “He [Charlie] could never really explain why he opened the dresser draw instead, put his hand under the folded white T-shirts his mom had laundered, and felt for the handgun he knew George kept hidden there.” (pg 119) Passed out drunk right next to him was George. Charlie, who had never even handled a firearm before, then raised the gun and fired it at George killing him instantly. Charlie then went on to call the police and when they arrived, he confessed immediately and was taken into custody.

    While I do not agree with the killing of anyone, ever, I feel as though that this 14-year-old boy who was acting in defense of his nearly dead mother doesn’t deserve to be sentenced to death. The reasons why the court was so quick to hand out the death sentence was one, George happened to be a cop working for the same department as the police who arrested Charlie, and two, this event took place in a deeply racist region of Alabama where for a black teen to be accused of murder only the harshest punishments were deemed necessary.

    Luckily enough, Stevenson was successfully able to get Charlie off death row, and even got him to be released from juvenile prison before his 18th birthday. Even though this story ends “well”, it still struck me very hard. Before this, Stevenson’s stories had all been about men well over 30 who had been wrongfully, or unfairly, sentenced to death, however, this one is clearly a lot easier for me to connect with. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for Charlie to go through all this, and it upsets me that this is only one of many similar cases that happened down in the deep south during the ’80s.

Work Cited:

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. 2019 ed., New York, Spiegel &    

    Grau, 2019.