Innocent on Death Row.

Seventeen-year-old Shareef Cousin was slated to die for a crime he didn't commit. What happens when the wrong guy gets a death sentence?

On a long, quiet tree-lined street at the edge of New Orleans's famous French Quarter, murder happens this fast: Michael Gerardi, 25, with his date, is walking back to his pickup truck. Three young men confront him. His companion, frightened, bolts for the restaurant they have just left. The gunman puts the barrel against Gerardi's cheek and pulls the trigger. A loud pop sounds--like a tire blowing out--and just like that, Gerardi is dead. The gunman steals his wallet and flees.

Gerardi's murder on March 2, 1995, capped a blood-soaked week in which 21 people were killed in New Orleans, which then had the highest murder rate in the U.S. So three weeks later, when a 16-year-old boy named Shareef Cousin (koo-ZAN) was arrested and charged with Gerardi's killing, a sigh of relief went over the city. At the trial, Connie Babin, Gerardi's date that night, identified Shareef as the killer. A prosecutor called the young man "an animal, unfit to live in society." The jury found the boy guilty and sentenced him to death.

At 17, Shareef was sent to death row in Louisiana's maximum-security prison at Angola, the youngest person in the world under sentence of death.

There was just one problem: Shareef wasn't guilty.

Before his arrest, Shareef was a troubled youth from one of the meanest streets in New Orleans--a soft-spoken, mournful-eyed kid who dreamed of becoming an accountant, but who lived on a block of abandoned houses and weedy lots. He stutter-stepped through his teen years, in trouble over drugs one year, a good student the next, always on the verge of either overcoming his circumstances or falling prey to them--until he ended up in a narrow cell with a concrete floor and a steel toilet.

"It was a hurtin' feeling," he says. "Because here you are on death row for a crime you didn't do. Majority of nights, I cried a lot."

When a Louisiana appeals court threw out his conviction two-and-a-half years later, Shareef became one of a mounting number of death-row inmates whose cases have been overturned. At a time when capital punishment has become widely accepted for the worst crimes, critics say a strange brew of prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias, and inadequate legal defense is sending innocent people to death row.

Shareef's case also raises another issue: The U.S. is one of only seven nations that permit the execution of youthful offenders--people convicted of crimes committed while they were minors--and has executed more of them in the last decade than the other six nations combined. And only the U.S. and Somalia have refused to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls for outlawing the teen death penalty.

Since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, 17 youthful offenders have been executed in the U.S., including five so far this year--more than in any year since 1954. Another 74 such prisoners are held under sentence of death in 16 states (see "Kids on Death Row"). Critics ask: Should teens, whom society considers too immature to buy a drink or cast a vote, be held accountable for their crimes with their lives?

Death-penalty supporters say yes. Execution is fair punishment for terrible crimes, they argue, and teens, who know right from wrong, should pay the price. "If you do an adult crime," says Wayne Bailey, a South Carolina district attorney, "the jury ought to have the option to come back with the death penalty."

THE LAST RIDE

The guards come for Shareef in his cell. Shackled in the back of a prison van, he rides to the death chamber five miles down a two-lane road through the green wastes of swamp that surround Angola. In the brightly lit room, he climbs onto the white-sheeted gurney; efficient guards tighten the straps over his chest, legs, and arms; the smell of rubbing alcohol invades his nose as a catheter is threaded into his vein. A curtain is pulled open. Faces on the other side of a glass window--the witnesses to his execution--stare at him. In seconds, the flow of poisons will begin: first, sodium thiopental to knock him out; a second drug, pancuronium bromide, to paralyze body functions; a third, potassium chloride, to stop the heart.

Then he wakes up. Another nightmare. Shareef is alone, in his cell at Angola, lying on the bristly state-issue blanket and staring into the dark, inhaling the peculiar, fresh smell of death row he had noticed from his first day. "Like a morgue," he says, "where they just house the dead bodies."

Shareef's experience--being wrongly placed on death row--is far from uncommon. A recent Columbia University study found that in two out of three death-penalty appeals, higher courts discovered serious mistakes that required them to overturn convictions. In Illinois, 13 cases in which condemned men were found to be innocent led Governor George Ryan to halt executions statewide last spring until new procedures could guarantee fairer results.

"I cannot support a system which, in its administration, has proven so fraught with error," Ryan says, "and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state's taking of innocent life."

At his trial, Shareef never doubted for a minute that he would be found not guilty. His coach and others testified that on the night of Gerardi's murder, Shareef was shooting the winning basket in an intramural basketball game. It didn't matter. When the jury foreman read the verdict, Shareef was unable to react. "I was numb," he says. "I didn't feel anything. It didn't seem real. It didn't seem like I was sentenced to death."

But it was real--and Shareef began to count down the days he had left. After several months, a police officer, convinced that the wrong man had been convicted, sent a copy of the secret 400-page police file on the Gerardi murder to a new lawyer who had taken over Shareef's appeals. That file revealed that Connie Babin, who at Shareef's trial said she would "never forget" his face, told police on the night of the murder that she wasn't wearing her contact lenses or glasses and wouldn't be able to identify anybody. In addition, prosecutors withheld strong evidence pointing to the possible guilt of three other suspects.

Other factors had probably worked against Shareef in his trial. His lawyer was faulted for mounting a lackluster defense--a not-uncommon situation. Death-penalty critics say defendants, many of whom are poor, frequently get a poor legal defense, often by court-appointed lawyers. The Columbia University study found that 37 percent of overturned death penalties occurred because defendants did not receive proper defense counsel.

And although prosecutors deny that race played a role in Shareef's conviction, critics say that all too often white law officers are willing to pursue shaky cases against powerless black youths. Nearly half of those on death row for crimes committed as teens are black. More significantly, 64 percent of the victims in teen death-penalty cases were white, while black teens were murdered at four to five times the rate of white teens during the 1990s. Gerardi, the man Shareef was accused of killing, was white.

"Anyone who pretends racism isn't a major part of the death penalty," says Clive Stafford-Smith, Shareef's new lawyer, "is living in a different country."

On death row, Shareef frequently feared he would lose his sanity. But no test was more severe than the day the guards came for a man in a nearby cell, whose execution date had arrived. "This was the reality check," Shareef says. "This was the part where, all right, this is what I'm facing. I was forced even more to say, `I'm gonna have to go through the same experience one day.'"

Despite the revelations from the police file, the appeals court took months to issue a ruling. On the day the decision came, Shareef was cleaning his cell. As he stood at the phone at the end of the long tier of cells and heard the news, the terrible fear that had preyed on his mind for two-and-a-half years lifted. He was swept with joy, but he suddenly thought of the other death-row inmates. A lot of guys had lived there for years and years, and didn't get a reversal, so you know I tried to hold my emotion. Shareef went back to the cell he had been cleaning. I didn't just clean up," he says, "I cleaned out. I packed my things and was ready to leave."

OTHER CASES ON APPEAL

But Shareef still had legal problems. When he was arrested for murder, he was also charged with four armed robberies. On what he calls bad advice from his lawyer, he agreed to plead guilty to those charges to win favor with the judge presiding over his murder trial. He was sentenced to 20 years for the robberies. The case is under appeal. Shareef, who had begun hanging with a rough crowd, has admitted he was in the car when friends pulled two of the armed robberies. But he denies any involvement in the other two. His attorney says Shareef should have received a short sentence in juvenile detention as an accessory to the crimes. Says Stafford-Smith: "He should long since have been free."

Shareef currently serves his sentence in another prison in a barren wild of pine trees and grasslands near the Louisiana border with Mississippi. He'll be eligible for parole in five years. It's a hard life: seven days a week working in the fields next to the prison fences, laced with razor wire glittering in the sun.

Nowadays he is reflective about what happened to him. "Even though my childhood was taken away from me--that was a great loss--I gained a greater respect toward life, so I have to call it necessary losses. I can't live like it didn't happen, 'cause it happened, it's reality. But this," he says, gesturing at the prison walls surrounding him, "is only temporary. I'm not on death row any more, so it's only temporary."

Cruel and Usual?

Condemned killer Anthony Bryan thought he had a pretty good argument to keep himself out of Florida's electric chair. The U.S. Supreme Court stopped Bryan's execution last fall to hear his claim that Florida's chair violates the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment.

The last killer to die in Florida's electric chair had been Alien "Tiny" Davis, a 300-pound triple murderer. When the executioner pulled the switch, Davis's face contorted horribly, he made loud moaning sounds, and then a bright-red spew of blood burst from his nose onto his white shirtfront.

In two earlier cases, flames leaped from the face masks of convicts when the juice was turned on.

But then, last January, the Florida Legislature voted to allow inmates to choose between the chair and lethal injection. The Supreme Court reversed its decision to hear Bryan's case, and he was put to death a month later by lethal injection.

Of the 38 states that practice capital punishment, 34 use lethal injection. Only three--Alabama, Georgia, and Nebraska--rely exclusively on the chair.

PLEADING THE EIGHTH

The Supreme Court has used the Eighth Amendment to ban executions once before, in 1972, after deciding that it was imposed arbitrarily and applied disproportionately to African Americans. The states then wrote guidelines for capital murder cases to avoid bias and unfairness. And in 1976, the Court reinstated the death penalty.

The Court has also applied the Eighth Amendment to the execution of minors. In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled that executing those aged 15 and younger would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The following year, the Court ruled by one vote that the death penalty for 16- and 17-year-olds does not violate the Constitution.

But the Supreme Court has generally taken a hands-off approach to execution methods, invoking "an evolving standard of decency" as the guide for what is acceptable. In practice, the Court accepts what the majority of states do.

Currently that's lethal injection. But that method has its problems, too. In June, it took Florida officials 33 minutes and several Incisions to find a vein in Bennie Demps's body. "They butchered me back there," Demps told witnesses before he died. "I was in a lot of pain. They cut me in the groin; they cut me in the leg. I was bleeding profusely."

Florida officials respond: "The inmate suffered no undue discomfort."

Reasonable Doubts

One of the strongest arguments against the death penalty is this: If new evidence arises after an execution, it's simply too late. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, new evidence has proved the innocence of 87 death-row inmates, including those pictured below.

Capital-punishment defenders say these cases prove that the appeals process protects innocent people. Critics, however, say the numbers show that courts make mistakes, and risk executing an innocent citizen.

Many of these innocent people wound up on death row because of faulty evidence, inadequate defense, or courtroom error. The latest tool in overturning wrongful convictions involves testing the inmate's DNA--a protein found in all human cells that contains the unique genetic fingerprint of each person--and comparing it with DNA from the crime scene.

In Illinois, Dennis Williams spent 18 years on death row before DNA evidence proved he didn't commit the murder he was accused of. In Oklahoma, Ronald Williamson came within five days of his execution before DNA testing cleared him. Without DNA testing, both men might now be dead.

Politics of Death

When convicted murderer Gary Graham was executed in Texas last dune, death penalty opponents harshly attacked presidential candidate George W. Bush, who, as Governor of Texas, could have stopped the execution.

Supporters say Graham was convicted on the kind of shaky eyewitness testimony that could end up sending an innocent man to his death. Bush, who has presided over more than 130 executions--more than any other Governor--defends the Texas record on executions.

"If you ask me whether I think we've ever executed an innocent person, my answer to you is no, I don't believe so," he says. "And I've reviewed every single case."

THE FALLOUT?

Bush's opponent, Vice President Al Gore, who also supports the death penalty, hasn't criticized Bush on the Issue. "If the record shows that he has done a terrible job [handling cases as Governor], then I'm sure that would be a legitimate issue," Gore says. "I haven't reached that conclusion."

How much will Bush's death-penalty record hurt him at the polls? Not much, observers say: although polls show that support for the death penalty has fallen 20 percent from its all-time high a few years ago, more than 60 percent of the public still support it.

Kids on Death Row

In 1976, there were 12 people on death row for crimes they committed as juveniles. Today, there are 76, more than six times as many as before. The number has increased fro two main reasons: The average number or young people sentenced at death each year has risen, while the number of cases that have been reversed on appeal has declined. These trends coincide with nationwide movements in the past decade to treat teenage offenders as adults and to limit the appeals process.

Besides an appeal or a pardon, the only other way off death row is execution. Since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976, 17 people have been executed for juvenile crimes--15 of them since 1990.

[GRAPH OMITTED]

For more information on teens and the death penalty visit UPFRONT ONLINE.

nytimes.com/upfront

FOCUS: How Deception and a Sloppy Defense Sentenced a 17-Year-Old to Death

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand what it's like to be a teenager wrongly condemned to die; how the legal system can go wrong; and arguments for and against U.S. use, almost alone in the world, of execution for crimes committed at age 16 and 17.

Discussion Questions:

* Critics say laws requiring appeals of the death penalty delay justice and waste millions. Do you agree?

* On August 17, a committee of the UN Human Rights Commission said that the execution of people who committed crimes when they were minors violates international law. Should the U.S. heed this call from the world community?

CLASSROOM STRATEGIES

Before Reading: How many students favor the death penalty? Note the tally. How would students feel if they were sentenced to death for a crime they did not commit?

Discussion: Why do innocent people end up on death row? Was Gov. George Ryan of Illinois right to suspend the death penalty? The Supreme Court said an "evolving standard of decency" bars executions of people who committed their crime before age 16. What does that mean? What accounts for the increase in juvenile criminals on death row? (See graph.)

Cooperative Learning: Have students write scenes for a TV drama in which police and prosecutors secretly discuss hiding information about Connie Babin's limited eyesight. What do they say about withholding evidence against other suspects?

Research: Do students know anything about death-row inmates in their state? (Twelve states do not have the death penalty.) Check this Web site for information: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/DRU SA-StateChart.html Students might contact their state's corrections department to research inmates. The bar association may provide information on how counsel is appointed for indigent defendants.

Role-play: Students can play jurors deciding the punishment for police and prosecutors who obstruct justice. What punishment, if any, do lawyers who provide a poor defense deserve?

Revisit: Go back to students' vote on the death penalty. Have them explain why they would or would not change their vote.