The Curious Researcher Exercise 4.1

               For my final essay of the semester, I decided to write about the topic of child execution. This has been a controversial topic that has since recent been a bit of a concern globally. It used to occur all over the world, but now it only happens in, I believe, 7 countries. This has continued to occur because people are not exactly sure how to handle a child who has committed an 'adult' crime. When I say child execution, I mean children being incarcerated and put on death row. Most people have mixed feelings about the situation. They are not entirely sure how to handle a child who actually murdered someone. I feel that this really should not be happening in the first place because kids are still growing and maturing. Although this does not excuse the action, the child still needs time to grow as an individual. I have not found much more out at this point rather than the bits of history I have scrounged up and a list of the cases done in the United States. For example, the last known execution in the United States was in 1947. It did not surprise me that it has been so long since the last case. A few questions rise when dealing with this subject, such as why is this still happening or how are people okay with these kinds of decisions? This affects mostly the families of the children being executed and the people dealing with the case. I think we should put a stop to this and discover what actually causes a child to come to this point rather than killing them off immediately. I believe this because again, children are still growing and maturing, so they should be given a second chance seeing as that may be all they know. I think we should offer therapy sessions and do whatever we can to help these children as much as possible and then returning to the case when they are adults to see if anything has changed.

Exercise 2.2 The Curious Researcher

For the next exercise in the book, we have to choose one of the 3 steps and further our research. I decided to do step 1, which is searching my topic using different keywords in a general search engine like Google or Bing. I chose Google and tried the terms 'juvenile behavior' and 'juvenile execution.' I came across a few webpages filled with the history of child executions. I tried to do further research on them, but the cases are so old, there's no record of what exactly they did. Basically, I could not find any alibis for any of the cases. Not even the most recent one, which was in 1947. Or at least the most recent on that page. For those of you who do not know, I am researching child executions and the psychology behind it to bring them to that point. I know it sounds morbid and a very depressing topic to research, but I am more interested in their behavior and why they did what they did to bring them to death row. Unfortunately, that is turning out to be a lot harder than I was hoping. Because there is no alibi from any of the juveniles, there's really no record of them besides their death row sentence. I may have to change my topic a bit since this is proving to be almost not worth it. I am not giving up just yet, but I may have to tweak it a bit, seeing as this may be near impossible with no records and my not being a professional psychologist so I cannot exactly diagnose them. I have taken a few psych courses, but that does not make me a professional nor give me the right to diagnose whatever to whomever. For now, I am going to see what I can come up with, but until then, I am going to have to start tweaking.