Innocent on Death Row.

• Author: VILBIG, PETER
• Position: Cases of innocent people sentenced to die

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...