When I began reporting the story that grew into “Against Death,” a Haverford grad’s recent successful fight against the juvenile death penalty in the U.S., I wasn’t sure I agreed with our protagonist’s point of view. Coming from a tough part of Philadelphia, I’d seen some crime in my time. As a police reporter, I was familiar with a darkness that seems unthinkably alien on the dappled Green of Founders Hall. Stephen Harper ’76, a handsome, brilliant son of Warren, Pa., whose father, uncle, and brother had all graduated from Haverford, and who are well-off lawyers and college professors, appeared to me to be operating on another plane from the realities of Overtown, or Little Haiti, the hard black Miami ghettos where many of Steve’s current clients (he’s an Assistant Public Defender there) come from. Perhaps he’d idealized the nature of his struggle? “What,” I asked him, “is so hopeful about saving a kid who’s murdered someone from lethal injection” or— at the time of our story—“Old Sparky,” Florida’s notoriously inefficient electric chair? To spend the greater part of the life that remained to him in a steel-clanging echo chamber of despair, violence, and depravity?

Harper then began talking about a 30-year-old convict named Damon Peterson, currently doing life at the Apalachee Correctional Institution in Sneads, Florida, for killing a German tourist during a car-jacking in 1993, when he was 16. Peterson’s background was so horrendous, his mishandling by his family and the state so egregious, that it’s scarcely comprehensible for middle-class people living ordinary lives. And from the moment his “free-fall” was arrested, Peterson began to improve, to the point where he’s become a leader and example for the hundreds of young men entering Apalachee every year: “He’s doing good. He’s helping. And some day he may get a chance to start his own life over again,” Harper said. “If he’d been executed [something Florida was more than a little inclined to do], hundreds of others might never have had the chances they have now, through having known him.”

Harper and many other lawyers, doctors, and statesmen involved in groups like the Juvenile Death Penalty Initiative, which worked to ban the jdp in the U.S. on March 1, 2005, relied on scientific research that has determined that the development of the frontal lobe of the brain is not fully complete until one is 22 to 24 years old. Before that, brain functions governing impulse, long-range planning, reason and even anger are in formative states. Therefore, judging youngsters under 18 by the same standards as adults who commit horrific crimes constitutes “cruel and unusual” punishment, a violation of the Eighth Amendment. When in September 2001, Harper himself began to experience trouble multi-tasking and planning long-term, he was diagnosed with an astrocytoma, a tumor in his left frontal lobe. It was interfering with his own functioning to some degree, though he’s been able to go on with his work in the Public Defender’s Office, and as Adjunct Professor of Juvenile Justice at the University of Miami.
A profound point.

John Lombardi
Senior Writer