Because of Her Age, Many View Her as a Cause Celebre : Indiana Girl, 17, One of 35 Awaiting Execution

At an age when most girls are busy with school, homework and dates, Paula Cooper has a different routine. She sits locked in her prison cell 23 hours a day, waiting to die.

Cooper is a teen-ager and a murderer. In May, 1985, when she was just 15, she stabbed an elderly Bible teacher 33 times with a butcher knife. The victim, according to testimony, recited the Lord’s Prayer as she lay dying.

Last summer, Cooper became the youngest female sentenced to death in the United States since 1892. Now 17, she is one of 35 inmates--only two are females--awaiting execution for murders and other crimes committed at age 17 or younger.

Cooper was one of four girls charged in the slaying of Ruth Pelke, 78. They fled with $10 and the victim’s 1976 Plymouth. Cooper, portrayed as the ringleader, received the only death sentence; the others got prison terms.

Cooper, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced by a judge who opposes capital punishment, but said the law is the law.

Judge Tells of Conflict

“There was a tremendous personal conflict,” said Lake County Judge James Kimbrough. “(but) I felt I really had no alternative. . . . I do not believe any individual judge can pick an age and say, ‘This is too young.’ ”

Cooper’s attorney, Kevin Relphorde, sees it differently. “We can’t condone what Paula did,” he said, “(but) I don’t think we’re God.”

Cooper was a chronic runaway with a troubled childhood. She was among nine juveniles sentenced to die in 1985 and the first nine months of 1986, but because she is so young and the only girl, her case has sparked more emotion, more debate and more publicity than others.

“She has become a cause celebre ,” said Lake County deputy prosecutor James McNew. “People forget about the reason she’s in prison . . . what she did, the victim, the victim’s family, friends and the suffering this has caused.”

Much of the attention has come from Western Europe, where Cooper’s appearance on West German television prompted hundreds of Germans, French and Italians to write the judge and attorneys, protesting the sentence.

In Gary, the No. 1 murder city in 1984, according to FBI statistics, the response was different. “Everybody I talked to in the community is in favor of her (getting) the death penalty,” Relphorde said.

Elsewhere, Cooper’s case is a rallying point for death penalty opponents.

Ayatollah Comparison

“If the ayatollah hanged a 15-year-old child, we’d say, good God, they’re barbarous,” said Henry Schwarzschild, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project. “That’s precisely what Indiana proposes to do.”

But Ernest van den Haag, professor of jurisprudence and public policy at Fordham University, said people commit most of their crimes between the ages of 13 and 20, and if they aren’t punished, that, “in effect, gives immunity to those who commit crimes most frequently.”

Just 281 people, including nine women, have been executed in the United States for crimes committed at 17 or younger. The first execution, in 1642, was for bestiality. The most recent was carried out last May, for murder. The last execution of a female juvenile was in 1912.

Twenty-seven states with death penalty statutes have minimum ages at which a crime punishable by execution can be committed. That age is 18 in 10 states; in Indiana, it is 10. Legislation has been proposed in Indiana to prohibit execution of minors, and other states are considering similar steps.

Victor Streib, a Cleveland State University law professor, predicted that “in the next few years, the juvenile death penalty will be history.” He noted that there were 11 such sentences in 1982, but only six in the first nine months of 1986.

Other States Named

Amnesty International says that besides the United States, it knows of only 10 countries where people younger than 18 may be executed and have been, in some cases, in recent years. These are Bangladesh, Barbados, China, Cyprus, Iran, Ireland, Pakistan, Rwanda, South Korea and Tonga.

Opponents of executing juveniles cite the arguments used for adults--that the punishment is cruel and doesn’t deter crime--but they add that execution is even more absurd for minors because they are too immature to understand the finality of death.

“They seem to be diabolical at the time, but in some sense, it’s the playful behavior of adolescents,” Streib said. “Imposing death on people is part of child’s play. They don’t understand the senselessness of what they’re doing.”

Streib, author of an upcoming book, “Death Penalty for Juveniles,” also argues that capital punishment forecloses the option of rehabilitation.

Van den Haag says, however, that there is no evidence that juveniles are more easily rehabilitated than adults. “It’s true, they have a longer life before them, but it may be a longer life of crime,” he said.

Accomplices in Prison

McNew said that prosecutors at first sought the death penalty for all four girls in the Pelke case, but after details of the crime became clear, they focused on Cooper and Karen Corder, who had twisted the knife in the woman’s ribs while demanding to know where she kept her valuables.

The three others are serving sentences of 25 years to 60 years for murder or armed robbery.

At Cooper’s sentencing, her sister said that Paula’s father beat her with extension cords when she was a child, and their mother forced them to join her in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Her parents did not testify.

Cooper, said Relphorde, has a “child’s mind” and cried after the sentencing, but she has a “tough girl” side, too. Court records show that she and Corder wrote on medical cards given them in jail: “Give me the electric chair. Give me that shock.”

Before she was sentenced, Cooper admitted she had had sex with two jail guards and a counselor. Deputy prosecutor John Burke speculated that she might have thought being pregnant would help her avoid the death penalty.

Cooper expressed bitterness over the sentence. She said that people had turned their backs on her and suggested that she was being punished because she had not lied, while her cohorts held back “the whole story” about their roles in the murder. “How would you all feel when I am in my grave?” she asked.

She expressed remorse too, saying: “I didn’t do it on purpose, and I can’t just sit here and say I’m sorry, because sorry don’t do it. Sorry isn’t good enough for me. And sorry isn’t good enough for you.

“I hope that one day, I can get out and start my life over. . . . Maybe I can finish school. Will I have a chance?”