Bush Gets Death Penalty Lecture From a 13-Yr.-Old

WASHINGTON —  President Bush shone the White House spotlight today on a school program that teaches youngsters to resist drugs and wound up hearing a tough lecture from a 13-year-old against the death penalty he favors.

Chantee Charles of nearby Arlington, Va., one of three youngsters invited to speak at a Rose Garden ceremony, appeared to take the President aback with her musings on capital punishment, which she called murder.

“It does not solve anything. . . . The guard that turns on the switch to electrocute the prisoner is just as much a murderer as the person who has commited the crime,” the seventh-grader said.

She added that the executioner “must feel guilty afterward, but I guess they get paid for it.”

Chantee claimed that “probably thousands” of innocent prisoners have been executed and argued that death penalty proponents “miss the point that the prisoner has a family too.”

She told reporters afterward she did not know of the President’s stance in favor of the death penalty.

After hearing two other young people talk about the need to resist peer pressure to use drugs, Bush, who favors the death penalty for cop-killers and drug kingpins, said, “My turn.”

But instead of rebutting Chantee, the President thanked all three youths and said:

“It’s not easy to get up in front of a big scary audience like this and do such a good job, say what’s on your heart, not worry if people agree with you or not, but recognizing that there’s a common theme here that you all did a beautiful job on, and that is turning your back on drugs.”

The President then launched into a pitch for the $7.9-billion anti-drug strategy he announced Sept. 5 and has trumpeted daily in speeches and ceremonies like the one today that honored the Los Angeles-based Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE, program.

Attended DARE Class

Bush recalled that he attended a class last year at which a Los Angeles police officer was teaching the DARE curriculum and said, “I know it works.”

DARE has spread from its start in 50 Los Angeles classrooms in 1983 to more than 50,000 classrooms across the United States and abroad, he said.

“These kids have dared to excel, and they are succeeding,” Bush said. “So far so good, and yet so far to go. . . . Let us finish the job DARE has started and create an America we can all be proud of--an America free of drugs.”