Riviera Beach pastor asks U.N. to help Tate

By Alexander G. Higgins

April 5, 2003

An American pastor has appealed to the top United Nations human rights body in Geneva to urge Gov. Jeb Bush to ease the punishment of a boy sentenced to life without parole.

"Lionel Tate's request for clemency is on the governor's desk as I speak," the Rev. Thomas Masters told the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission on Thursday. It was unclear if the commission would act as it is halfway through its six-week annual session.

Masters, pastor of New Macedonia Baptist Church in Riviera Beach, also appeared before the commission last year on behalf of Nathaniel Brazill Jr., one of his church members. Brazill was 13 in May 2000 when he fatally shot teacher Barry Grunow outside Lake Worth Middle School. The boy claimed the gun went off accidentally, but he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Urging commission members to intervene, Masters on Thursday noted that Bush's brother, President George W. Bush, has titled his education program "No child left behind."

"We don't want to leave Lionel Tate behind, either," said Masters, president of the organization Under Our Wings that campaigns against adult prosecution of children.

He told reporters that, even though the United States pioneered juvenile justice, it is using adult prosecution every day against thousands of children under a national policy of getting tough on crime.

Amnesty International says about 200,000 youngsters under 18 are tried as adults each year in the United States.

Tate was 12 when a Florida court convicted him of killing 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick, a girl his mother was baby-sitting. His lawyers asked a state clemency board last month to reduce the teen's sentence. The panel has not ruled on the request.

Holding up a poster-size photograph of the tear-stained boy, Masters said he regarded the death of Eunick as an accident.

But, "regardless of the circumstances of the death, every recent research tells us that the brain is not fully developed as a child or even as an adolescent," Masters said. "Therefore, a child is less culpable and more redeemable."

He said adults receive leniency if they are found to have had the mind of a child when they committed a crime.

"However, if a child does the same thing, we send the child to prison for life without parole or either execute a juvenile offender," he said.

Masters said U.N. treaties regard 18 as the youngest a person can be considered an adult.

"If it applies to child soldiers, it applies to child labor, it applies to child pornography, then it also should apply to child prisoners," Masters said.

"Any time you put a child in prison for life without the possibility of parole, it's just inhumane," he said.