56 pages • 1 hour read
Susan KuklinNo Choirboy: Murder, Violence, and Teenagers on Death Row
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Hate Is a Killer, Dialogue I”
Kuklin profiles Napoleon Beazley, an African American youth convicted of killing a Texas businessman in a carjacking when he was 17 years old. Kuklin largely draws on interviews with his mother and brother, who still live in the Texas home where Napoleon grew up and whom she interviewed together, allowing them to comment on each other’s thoughts in real-time. For legal context, she also quotes some emails from Napoleon’s lawyer, Walter Long. She could not interview Napoleon himself because he was executed by the state of Texas in 2002, only three years before the US Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for juvenile offenders.
Napoleon’s age and lack of criminal record—he had been a gifted student and athlete—made his death sentence a cause célèbre, triggering what Kuklin calls an international “crusade” against the death penalty. Jamaal, Napoleon’s younger brother, notes Napoleon’s election as class president as well as captain of the football team, adding that no one ever had anything bad to say about him prior to his arrest, an event that shocked their small town.
Arriving at the Beazley home for the interview, Kuklin finds both Jamaal and his mother, Rena, to be warm, inviting people. Jamaal enfolds her in a gentle hug, and Rena apologizes that her husband, Ireland, is out of town on business. Ireland was the first African American man elected to their town’s city council.
Jamaal, who wears a shirt with Napoleon’s photo on the front, is still deeply haunted by what happened to his big brother—not only his execution, but the fact that Napoleon took a human life. He struggles with the reality that someone who seemed loving and giving could do something so terrible: “Love is worse than hatred. Love will tear you apart. Love will hurt your soul” (133). He addresses the fact that his brother’s victim, a white businessman named John Luttig, was the father of a federal judge, himself an acquaintance of three Supreme Court justices. Rena opines that Napoleon, a model citizen and straight-A student, would never have been charged with capital murder had the victim been less prominent. She believes that her son’s death was “revenge,” and Jamaal concurs, noting that even the Pope tried to stop the execution and that TV celebrities like Montel Williams and Phil Donahue invited the family on their shows. None of this advocacy saved him.
Rena reveals that Napoleon never discussed the murder of Luttig with them because he knew their conversations were monitored by the police; the family still has no idea what happened that day. The only eyewitnesses were Napoleon’s accomplices, two brothers who participated in the carjacking and later testified against Napoleon to escape the death penalty. An email from Walter Long observes that the two brothers did not get off lightly even with the deal: In a crafty legal maneuver, the judge “stacked” their state and federal sentences, ensuring that they would each serve at least 80 years before becoming eligible for parole. Long says that the harshness of these sentences was unprecedented, especially for cooperating witnesses. The brothers, Rena believes, lied in court when they claimed that they were “afraid” of Napoleon and that he had threatened to kill them if they didn’t accompany him on the carjacking. In reality, the brothers were frequent houseguests who often partied with her son.
Another email from Walter Long cites the criteria a jury must consider before sentencing a defendant to death. Long suggests that the brothers’ damning testimony at Napoleon’s trial prejudiced the jury against him and the many mitigating factors that might have saved him. The brothers later recanted much of their testimony, stating that Napoleon had actually “cried” after the murder and threatened suicide. On these grounds, Napoleon’s legal team asked for a new trial, but it was denied. Long also describes how racial prejudice was exploited throughout the trial, adding that after the verdict, a juror was heard referring to Napoleon with the “n-word.”
During the seven years Napoleon spent on death row, his close-knit family remained supportive of him, visiting as often as they were allowed. Jamaal shares that Napoleon never complained about his situation or discussed his life on death row; rather, he seemed deeply involved in his relatives’ lives, plans, and interests, always trying to keep their spirits up.
When Jamaal was 17, Napoleon received a last-minute stay on the very eve of his execution. He and Rena recall that night’s “ecstatic” celebration, when friends, relatives, neighbors, and members of the press thronged the Beazley household. Jamaal prayed and thanked God. However, their joy was relatively short-lived: Nine months later, at the age of 25, Napoleon was executed. Walter Long points out a final cruelty: Just before Napoleon’s execution, a death row inmate in Missouri named Chris Simmons was granted a stay because the US Supreme Court was about to rule on a case (Atkins v. Virginia) that could bear on the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles to death. Long immediately requested an identical stay for Napoleon but was refused. Chris Simmons eventually took his own case to the Supreme Court, and the result was Roper v. Simmons, which ended the death penalty for juveniles. That was in 2005, three years too late to save Napoleon.
Jamaal celebrated a personal landmark—his high school graduation—three days before his brother’s execution, yet he remembers nothing about that time, saying he was like a “zombie.” He says what happened to his brother altered his personality, making him a loner, possibly out of fear of falling prey to peer pressure as he believes Napoleon did. Rena thinks that her prolonged heartache and grief might have made her a better and more compassionate person. Whatever the cause, she feels more “aware” of certain things, such as the complexities of human nature. Before Napoleon’s ordeal, she never considered that the lives of prisoners on death row might have value and be worth saving.
Chapter 4 Analysis
Napoleon, the fourth of the juvenile offenders profiled in Kuklin’s book, is the most mysterious: Not only was Kuklin unable to interview him, but he was careful to share no details of his alleged crime with his circle of intimates while he was alive, knowing their visits with him were monitored and recorded. He also did not share the details of prison life, so it is unclear how his experience behind bars compares to that of the previous three young men. The focus of this chapter, then, is Napoleon’s family and the continuing incomprehension and grief they experience regarding both his alleged crime and their loss of him. In its focus on Death and Mourning, it bridges the two halves of Kuklin’s book, tying the early chapters’ interviews with juvenile offenders to Chapter 5’s interview with a murder victim’s family.
Like Roy, Napoleon had no criminal record; in fact, he was an outstanding student and athlete before he somehow became involved in the brutal slaying of a businessman. The shooting, like those for which Roy and Nanon were sentenced to death, seems to have been an act of pure impulse, but his accomplices quickly made a deal to save themselves by portraying Napoleon as a cold-blooded killer. Though they did not reap the same benefits that Roy and Nanon’s similarly positioned accomplices did, the damage to Napoleon was done.
More than perhaps any other case in the book, Napoleon’s illustrates the theme of Race, Injustice, and Capital Punishment. A decisive factor in Napoleon’s sentencing, in the opinion of his lawyer Walter Long, was race—both Napoleon’s and that of his victim, who was both white and well-connected. Napoleon’s mother and younger brother both believe that, had the murder victim been someone less “important,” Napoleon’s sentence would have been much lighter—an indictment not only of the criminal justice system’s racism but also of its arbitrary application of punishments. Walter Long also points to evidence of racial bias in the jury selection process, as well as in one of the jurors.
For Napoleon’s family, his execution was a double loss, as it also precluded any possibility of closure regarding the crime itself. Jamaal finds it very hard to reconcile his popular, warmhearted brother with the brutal slaying of an old man and the attempted murder of the man’s wife. The accomplices’ revised statements suggest that, if Napoleon did commit murder, it was an act of panic and (as in Mark’s case) immediately regretted. Jamaal even wonders if it might have been a “mental breakdown” (136).
It remains unclear whose idea the carjacking was, but the two accomplices, who were brothers, testified in court that Napoleon forced them to go with him. What goes unsaid is the possibility that the prosecutors may have coached the brothers to ensure a death sentence for Napoleon. Their testimony seems to have negated the many mitigating circumstances in Napoleon’s case—his age, his good grades, his lack of a criminal record, etc.—and while they later recanted, the law requires that recanted testimony meet an extraordinarily high standard to secure a hearing. Kuklin suggests that in a system that incentivizes false accusations and confessions, this requirement merely compounds prior injustices.
Jamaal and Rena are the only relatives of an inmate whom Kuklin interviewed for her book, and their devotion, heartache, and dread show the anguish of a death-row sentence from the other side. Both Jamaal and Rena remember the man they visited in prison every week as the Napoleon they had always known: gentle, considerate, supportive, and, despite his situation, unfailingly good-humored. Rena adds that her son began to physically torture himself during his imprisonment—e.g., refusing painkillers when four of his teeth were being pulled—probably out of guilt, which would seem to contradict his alleged remorselessness.
In a sense, Napoleon’s family lived in a prison of their own: one of constant fear, uncertainty, deprivation, and false hopes. When Napoleon was executed, Jamaal fell into a zombie-like trance for several days. He says the experience of losing his brother, drawn out over eight years, had a profound effect on his personality, making him a “loner” with trust issues: If his brother could be talked into an act of such cruelty and stupidity, anyone was susceptible. No Choirboy thus suggests that the lost potential of incarcerated youths can extend beyond a crime’s immediate perpetrators and victims, affecting the family and friends of both. On the flip side, Rena echoes Roy, Mark, and Nanon in claiming that her own suffering has made her a better person—one more apt to see the good in people accused of doing terrible things. She recalls how her son would receive letters of support from all over the world and would answer them in their own languages. “Killing him was a real waste” (147), she says.
