SEVENTY TIMES SEVEN

A brutal murder ends in reconciliation—at least of a sort.

“Where’s the money, bitch?” According to court records, that’s what Paula Cooper, a Black teenager, shouted as she stabbed an elderly White woman in Gary, Indiana, in 1985. Arrested the next day, Cooper entered a system of juvenile justice that, as Mar notes, is overwhelmingly populated by minority members, as was true in the case of the Black perpetrator and her three accomplices. The judge agonized: “He says he’s been asked many times over the past few months for the age at which juveniles should be charged as adults, and he does not know the answer.” Two accomplices received terms of 35 and 60 years, and the third, who did not enter the house but essentially organized the crime, was sentenced to 25 years in a plea deal. Cooper, at 15, became the youngest woman ever sentenced to death. Multiple appeals followed, even as public sentiment in the Reagan era turned increasingly in favor of the death penalty. Meanwhile, the victim’s grandson, at first aching for vengeance, gradually took the view that capital punishment was wrong and began a long, lonely campaign to fight against it, including holding vigils at executions. Mar’s story has a redemptive conclusion of sorts: Cooper was released on parole after serving nearly 20 years after the grandson petitioned the judge to do so. Against the grandson’s hope, however, she found no way to “reenter society.” In the Trump era, the court system has turned actively pro–death penalty, with Attorney General William Barr reviving federal executions and the conservative Supreme Court ruling, in one case, that in cases of homicide, sentences of life without parole are permissible even for a juvenile, “without the need to rule on whether that young person has a hope of rehabilitation.”

A probing examination of the intersection of race, crime, and punishment.