Eating our Young

The Hanging of 12-Year-old Hannah Ocuish

THE EXECUTION OF CHILDREN is one of the darkest legacies of America’s slavery and capital punishment histories. Between 1642 and 1924, an estimated 102 American juveniles were convicted and executed prior to their eighteenth birthday. Around 20 of those juveniles were Virginians, all of them Black, and all whose ages have been verified as under 18 by various sources, including court records, county auditor records, and the National Death Penalty Database at Albany, New York.

It is important to note that these numbers undoubtedly vary, and there most likely have been many more. It was not common to record the ages of condemned prisoners until after 1900, and even these numbers can be unreliable until the advent of social security and personal ID cards, such as driver’s licenses.

Most States hanged young children under a concept called “rebuttable presumption,” in which the child was presumed to know right from wrong unless proved otherwise, and they were overwhelmingly minorities. In Arkansas, a Cherokee Indian named James Arcene was allegedly 10 years of age in 1873 when he and a companion named William Parchmeal murdered a Swedish storekeeper named Henry Fiegel. The two men avoided capture until 1884 when Arcene was arrested for selling whiskey on the reservation at Tahlequah. A deputy marshal…