Up until the unusually chilly early-morning hours of Thursday, September 13, 1990, Gina Grant’s future seemed assured. At age fourteen, she was perhaps the most promising girl in the town of Lexington, South Carolina. She was bright, popular, accomplished, and pretty—a cherubic-faced, blond-haired honors student, who always seemed to have time to help her friends with their problems, from homework to romance, and who had finished eighth grade in glory as her school’s first female student-body president. The day before, she had still been musing about which she wanted to be when she grew up—a Supreme Court justice or a doctor. But now her choices had narrowed: either she could sit in the back of one of the patrol cars parked in her family’s driveway while detectives, uniformed officers, and forensic experts swarmed through her family’s stiffly proper Colonial brick house or she could warm up at the Lexington County sheriff’s office, a few miles away. Ostensibly, the law-enforcement officers presenting her with these choices were concerned about her catching cold. But in truth Gina Grant was already in custody, the prime suspect in the savage killing of her mother.
Inside the house was a grisly scene—the detritus of what Detective John (Jay) Phillips, a long-faced, laconic veteran of the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department, described as “one of the top three most brutal homicides I’ve ever seen.” In the kitchen, blood was splattered from the floor to the cereal boxes on top of the refrigerator. On the parquet floor in an adjoining hallway, a wide smear of blood traced a trail from one room to another. And at the end of the trail lay the corpse of Gina Grant’s mother, forty-three-year-old Dorothy Mayfield—or, as she was known around town, Dot. Protruding from her throat was the handle of a kitchen knife, which had been plunged so deep that the tip lodged an inch and a half into her spinal column.
In January, 1991, Gina Grant pleaded no contest to her mother’s killing. She served approximately eight months in detention. Three years later, in the fall of 1994, she applied for admission to next September’s freshman class at Harvard. Nearly eighteen thousand students applied for places in the Harvard Class of 1999, and just over two thousand were admitted. Gina Grant was one of them. It was a remarkable turnaround.
Harvard, however, knew nothing of the nature of the dark chapter of Gina’s past. Indeed, the university’s admissions officers had come to refer to her as “the orphan,” because, as a number of glowing recommendations revealed, for the previous four years she had been living without parents. Her father, an engineer, had died of cancer when she was eleven; and, as far as the admissions office knew, her mother, an executive secretary at Bankers Trust, had died in “an accident” when Gina was fourteen. The facts were that after being released on probation Gina had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to live with a paternal aunt and uncle, and to piece her life back together as a high-school student. She had gone back to school, at Rindge and Latin, a large and well-regarded public high school, where she had ranked near the top of her class, tutored underprivileged children, and served as co-captain of the tennis team. Her secret, she believed, would stay legally buried. As a juvenile, she’d been told, most of her court records were confidential, although some court proceedings were open to the public, and had been reported in the local papers. Her time had been served, and, having paid her debt to society and succeeded in staying out of additional trouble, she expected to be given the fresh start that is the fundamental premise of the juvenile-justice system.
In her determination to be treated just like any other college applicant, Gina Grant posed some uncomfortable questions: Should someone who took another person’s life—whatever the circumstances were, and however reformed the taker of that life was said to be—be granted so spectacular a second chance? Should a young killer, even one of inarguable talent and accomplishment, be accorded the same opportunities as her law-abiding peers to seek the rewards of society? In juvenile-justice theory, the law says yes: rehabilitation is the primary goal of corrections. But theory and practice can be quite different things. In an era of anger and frustration at the erosion of values, the special protections extended to juvenile offenders are coming under particular attack. In April, the Harvard admissions office rescinded its acceptance of Gina Grant. The school, which considers admissions matters confidential, suggested that its only reason for deciding against Grant was that she had failed to tell the full truth about herself. But it is far from certain that had she done so she would have fared better.
Gina Grant quickly became the subject of a national debate, even though only the barest outlines of her case were known. A Times editorial criticized Harvard for “unseemly haste” in rescinding its offer of admission and declared, “Because universities teach by how they act in society as well as what they offer in the classroom, Harvard has an obligation to behave in an educated way. In the matter of Ms. Grant, it has not.” Frank Rich, the Times columnist, suggested that although not all the facts were known, it appeared that Grant had faced a judge and been punished for a crime “that may have been committed in at least theoretical self-defense.” Some conservatives took Harvard’s side; Tom Knott, a columnist for the Washington Times, mocked Grant’s defenders and asked, “What’s a little matricide if a person is willing to grow from the experience?”
The debate has divided those who know Gina Grant as well as those who do not. It is a debate between those who see her as a con artist who has lied, connived, and literally got away with murder and those who consider her to be as much victim as perpetrator—someone with a childhood so horrific, and a life both before and after the crime so exemplary, that she is the very model of a juvenile offender entitled to a new beginning.
Certainly no one questions the brutality of the killing. Dana Grant, Gina’s older sister—she was twenty-three at the time—later recalled the events of that night in a statement to police. Dana had arrived home shortly after midnight and had been unable to open the front door. Upon finding it bolted shut, she rushed to a local gas station to call the sheriff. When she returned, she found her sister at the top of the family’s driveway in a state of near-hysteria. Gina told her that she and their mother had got into a terrible fight, and that their mother was hurt, possibly even dead.
By the time the first police officers arrived at the house, Gina had recounted, further, that she and her mother had been arguing over a boy she was dating at the time—a football player in her class who was a poor student and had a record of petty crime. Mrs. Mayfield (who had taken the surname of a man she had married three months before she died) had forbidden her daughter to see him. Gina had also stated that later that evening, when she came out of her bedroom after a twenty-minute phone conversation with her boyfriend, her mother—who tests later showed was inebriated at the time—had told her they “needed to have it out” about “that son of a bitch.” Mrs. Mayfield, according to transcripts of Gina’s initial statement, then “took off her blouse and said, ‘I don’t want to mess up my $300 suit’ . . . and took off her watch and rings like she was getting ready to fight someone,” and began to attack Gina at the top of the stairs. At one point, Gina told the officers, her mother had rolled down the stairs and landed unconscious at the bottom. But then she unexpectedly “got up, and started tussling again,” Gina said. “She grabbed my neck and said, ‘One of us has got to go.’ ” Then Gina said, “I don’t know how she got it, but she got a knife. Her eyes were half closed—they were always like that when she was drunk—and I was terrified. I knew at that point she was going to kill me. I said, ‘No Mamma! No!’ ”The next thing she knew, Gina said, her mother had grabbed the knife and stuck it in her own neck.
The investigators were not convinced. It was improbable that someone would commit suicide by stabbing herself in the throat. Besides, the coroner later counted at least thirteen crushing blows to Mrs. Mayfield’s skull. Gina’s explanation that her mother’s head injuries had been caused by a combination of her falling down the stairs and “bumping into” a heavy vase did not enhance her credibility. Nor did the discovery in Gina’s bedroom closet later that night of a black garbage bag stuffed with bloody towels and a heavy crystal candlestick. The candlestick had been a birthday present from Gina to her mother. Forensic studies later suggested that it had been the object used to bash in her mother’s skull.
Confronted with this newly discovered evidence, Gina said, “I only withheld it from you because I thought you’d think I killed her. I didn’t want to go to jail because I did not kill her. I knew you would find it, but I was just hoping you wouldn’t. I did not kill my mother. I promise you, I did not.” At that point, Dana Grant cut off further questioning, saying she believed that her sister needed a lawyer. Gina was thereupon charged with her mother’s murder, and only then, according to the law-enforcement officials present, did she begin to cry.
By the next afternoon, because of unusual actions taken by the Lexington County sheriff, James R. Metts, virtually the entire county knew of Gina Grant’s arrest. A South Carolina state law protects juvenile defendants by requiring that their names be withheld from the press and the public. For nearly a hundred years, the American judicial system has treated juveniles differently from adult offenders, on the ground that their judgment and sense of responsibility are less developed and that their potential for rehabilitation is greater. In essence, the system holds that the punishment of youthful offenders should not include the stigma of public censure. But Metts released Gina Grant’s name to the press that very day. Four years later, a packet of the resulting newspaper stories was anonymously dropped off at Harvard’s admissions office, prompting the college to rescind its offer. “Yes, I did give her name out,” Metts said recently. “There was a law, and still is, that juvenile activity should remain anonymous,” he acknowledged, but in this case, he went on, he decided to ignore the law. “I was agitated,” he explained. “I felt this was a serious, adult kind of crime. And I think that the juvenile-justice system makes a mockery of justice.”
The sheriff’s attempt to make an example of Gina Grant backfired, however. In the aftermath of such a brutal killing, one might have expected mass condemnation of the accused—particularly in Lexington County, a conservative pocket of the Deep South that has been voting Republican long before it became fashionable to do so. Lexington County, whose population of a hundred and sixty-seven thousand is largely white, affluent, and fundamentalist Christian, is a bedrock of support for traditional family values—a place where “Honor thy father and thy mother” is still a matter of religious conviction. Yet, instead of branding Gina Grant a pariah, many members of the community embraced her cause. Her defense attorney, Jack Swerling, says that at first he was “outraged” that her case had been opened to the media, “but then it started working for us.”
Some would later suggest that the sympathy for Grant was merely an expression of élitism. “She was one of theirs,” declares Penny Miller, one of several juvenile-parole-board officers who saw no other reason to support Grant. The chairwoman of the board, Marlene McClain, suggested that if Grant had not been white, pretty, smart, and upper middle class, attitudes would have been quite different. “If she had been a minority with an I.Q. of seventy, she’d still be in jail,” McClain said.
While this is probably true, there was an additional reason for Lexington’s sympathy. Unlike the police, the parole board, and, later, the Harvard admissions committee, many in the community actually knew Grant and had some inkling of the difficulties she had faced at home. Although none condoned the killing, a number of conservative, hard-line supporters of law and order—including the family-court judge who eventually allowed her to plead no contest to voluntary manslaughter and serve less than a year in detention—believed that there had been mitigating circumstances. In fact, as word of Gina Grant’s incarceration spread, so did details of the home life she had been covering up, and these engendered a collective sense of guilt that a girl who had helped many other people with their troubles had tried to keep far more serious troubles of her own hidden. “We thought we had this terrible secret,” Dana Grant later said, “but after this happened we realized that it was no secret at all. Everybody knew about it, from the clerks to the neighbors.”
Mrs. Mayfield’s death was not the first to take place in the family’s house. When Gina was eleven, her father, Charles Grant, whom she adored, died, after a long and painful struggle with lung cancer. Although Gina was only in elementary school at the time, she had taken care of him herself after school until her mother got home from work. Moreover, there were nights during that period when her mother, whose drinking was growing more pronounced, did not come home at all. “She saw things that no child should see,” Eddie Walker, a former assistant principal of the Lexington Middle School, says. For one thing, Walker believes, Gina’s mother was “running around” with other men “at the time her daddy was dying.”
Then, one morning not long after her father’s death, Gina awoke to find herself alone in the house with the corpse of one of her mother’s older male friends: he had died overnight, and she was left to figure out what to do with the body. These traumas were compounded, according to several sources, by the behavior of her mother, who inexplicably blamed her for her father’s death, berated her incessantly, and refused to allow her to keep a photograph of her father in the house. Gina’s father, other family members say, had harbored hopes that Gina would one day go to Harvard.
By all accounts, Dorothy Mayfield’s alcoholism, which had been severe enough for her to have sought treatment at a rehabilitation center not long after her husband’s death, worsened alarmingly over the next three years. Although she managed to hold down a responsible bank job, court testimony suggested that she had passed out drunk almost every night, frequently after unleashing wild, abusive tirades, many of them directed at Gina. On occasion, she had also threatened to harm Gina if she ever told anyone about the family problems. Dr. Harold Morgan, a forensic psychiatrist in Columbia who was a consultant to the state’s Departments of Mental Health and Corrections, and who was hired as an expert witness by Gina Grant’s defense team, says, “It was the worst case of psychological abuse I have ever seen—and I’ve seen other kids who have killed their parents.”
Because the court records of Gina Grant’s case were supposed to be treated as confidential, Swerling and the presiding judge, Marc Westbrook, say they are not at liberty to discuss the nature of the child abuse to which Grant was subjected. Gina herself has also declined all comment. But Swerling, one of the state’s premier criminal lawyers, who has represented hundreds of murder defendants, and who has a wife and two teen-age children, says he was so moved after learning how difficult her family life had been that he toyed with the notion of becoming her legal guardian, but then an uncle and aunt, Allen and Carol Bennett, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, agreed to take on that role. “I was just floored when I learned what had been going on in her life, and how well she had been capable of doing anyway,” Swerling says. “In my twenty-three years of practicing, this is the quintessential case of a juvenile who deserves a second chance.”
Equally sympathetic, though for different reasons, was her mother’s brother, a certified public accountant named Curtis Dickson, who lived nearby and had special insight into the family problems. “Before this happened, I had never heard of a dysfunctional family,” he says. “But since then I’ve done a lot of reading. This family is not dysfunctional—it’s nonfunctional.”
The parents of Curtis Dickson and Dorothy Mayfield were small farmers battered by the Depression and overwhelmed by financial and psychological strains while the children were growing up. Dickson says his father “hoarded money” and “refused to provide” for his children; at one point, they were reduced to wearing flour sacks for clothes. Even more damaging, though, was their father’s “emotional violence.” Dickson says, “He’d run you down in a minute. You were stupid, lazy, couldn’t do anything right. He was just mean.” Like their father, Dickson adds, his sister could be “vicious,” and later on his nieces “faced constant harassment and ridicule, just like what we faced growing up.” And so when his niece Gina killed her mother, Dickson says, he understood why. He says of his own father, “I could have been driven to kill him. Don’t think I can’t relate to what went on in Gina’s mind.”
Yet, Sheriff Metts counters, there were virtually no eyewitnesses to this psychological abuse other than Gina’s sister, Dana, and although she corroborated Gina’s account in court, she had made no public statements. According to Paul Mones, a nationally known attorney and child advocate from California who has made a career of defending children in parricide cases, lack of witnesses and the defendant’s failure to confide in anyone are typical. “These cases are so alike it’s eerie,” Mones says. “I can’t tell you how many straight-A, honors students I have seen.” Rarely, he says, do such children tell authorities of abuse at home, even when they are asked about it. And something that further complicates their cases in the eyes of juries is that frequently they don’t just kill but “overkill,” leaving gruesome scenes behind. Moreover, most of them, he says, have a tendency to come across badly when they testify, because they become so detached from their own emotions that they seem to exhibit no remorse. Finally, in order to survive at home they are likely to develop “manipulative” personalities. Many seem, in Mones’s words, “like little shits.”
Indeed, one of the strikes against Gina Grant, in the eyes of the Sheriff and also, later, of the parole board, was what was seen as a tendency to coolly “evade responsibility” by “minimizing” what she had done. Metts was particularly scandalized by a report that only hours after killing her mother she had joked to a female officer accompanying her into the ladies’ room, “Don’t worry, I don’t have body parts in my pocket.” Gina was soon suffering chronic nightmares and needed to be sedated in order to sleep, but Metts had by then concluded that she was “a sociopath with no conscience.”
Lacking eyewitnesses, Gina was left with a number of adults who could testify only that they had seen what they described as previously overlooked signs of abuse. Eileen Harrelson, the mother of Gina’s best friend, Christy Harrelson, says she blames herself for not having taken more seriously various times when Gina showed up at her house with oddly explained injuries. Once, when Gina had a black eye, she said that her mother had accidentally poked her in the eye with her knuckle. On another occasion, Gina arrived on crutches after being treated at the hospital for torn ligaments in her ankle; she said she had fallen down the stairs, but admitted years later that in fact her mother had caused her fall. On occasion, according to Gina’s testimony in the court records, her mother had hit her hard enough to raise bruises for such lapses as failing to wax the kitchen floor after washing it.
Mones says that the act of parricide is usually triggered in children by a sense that their survival is at stake. “It just explodes one day, when all their options seem to them to collapse,” he says. “They’ve attempted to run away, and it didn’t work. They’ve tried to notify some authority, and no one cares. Afterward, everyone says, ‘Why didn’t they just tell someone, or open the door and run?’ But to them the apparent reality is that they are going to be killed, and in certain cases they are right.”
In the period preceding Gina’s killing of her mother, a number of these conditions coalesced. To begin with, two of the adults to whom she had grown closest had withdrawn from her life. Eddie Walker, the assistant principal who had taken a real interest in her, had been promoted to principal and moved to another school. Meanwhile, Gina’s former nursery-school teacher, Norma Brown, who had hired her as a helper when she was in eighth grade, had subsequently become, she herself says, too preoccupied with her own divorce to pay much attention to Gina’s growing problems. Then, during the summer before the killing, Gina faced the futility of trying to run away. Twice she stayed out of the house all night with the boyfriend her mother had forbidden her to see; each time she was caught. On the second occasion, she told police an incredible tale of her own abduction just as her mother was phoning in a missing-person report. Her concocted alibi suggests that she had a healthy respect for her mother’s temper, even if she disrespected her authority. As her friend Christy Harrelson says, “She really didn’t think of her mother as a parent. It was more like her mother was the child—a baby—just a drunk idiot.”
Ten days before the killing, Gina finally confided to Christy, whose family she had been living with as much as her mother would allow her to, that she was really scared. “Before that, she’d just tell me it wasn’t true when I said her mother was an alcoholic,” Christy, now a student at the College of Charleston, recalls. “But I knew. All you had to do was to go over to her house. Her mother was always drunk, and yelling at her.” As Christy relates it, the two girls were out on a float in nearby Lake Murray that Labor Day, when Gina confessed for the first time that she was afraid her mother might kill her. Christy urged Gina to repeat her account of her fears to Christy’s mother. And Gina finally opened up. “She told us she was scared for her life,” Christy recalls. Gina said that her mother had been drinking and taking Xanax, a sedative, and that she had been flying into violent rages, breaking into Gina’s room in the middle of the night and threatening to kill her. Gina and Dana had become so worried that they had disposed of a gun their mother kept.
Alarmed, Eileen Harrelson called the sheriff’s office the following day, and reached an officer named Mary Van De Weghe. As Mrs. Harrelson recalls the conversation, she told the policewoman that the mother of fourteen-year-old Gina Grant was a violent alcoholic, and that the daughter was afraid for her life. She says that Officer Van De Weghe told her that if she wanted to file a formal complaint she could, but Mrs. Mayfield would have to be told who had filed it. “For sure, that would have made Dot blow her stack, and probably would have kept her from letting Gina stay with us anymore,” she says.
Nine days later, after the sheriff’s office charged Gina Grant with murder, documentation of a self-defense motive might have helped her considerably. But there was no record that Harrelson had ever called. Van De Weghe soon left the sheriff’s office, with no forwarding address, and the Sheriff himself questions whether such a call was ever made.
But Mary Van De Weghe, on being reached in Louisville, Kentucky, where she now works in the security department of the Federal Reserve bank, confirms that Harrelson called to alert the sheriff’s office. She says that Mrs. Harrelson’s call had seemed like a minor matter and that she hadn’t bothered to take notes. On being asked how she had felt about the killing so soon afterward, she said, “Well, it was just like one of those things—damn, it happened!”
On January 21, 1991, Gina Grant, by now fifteen, pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter in the death of her mother. Notes taken by the psychologists who examined her for the state’s Department of Youth Services indicate that she couldn’t remember exactly what had happened that night. But after her psychiatrist had given her sodium amytal, a narcotic used to reduce inhibitions, she blurted out in a jumble of fragmented sentences the recollection that her mother had picked up a knife, that she herself had knocked it out of her mother’s hand, that her mother had then picked up another knife, and that she herself had then reached for the candlestick on the mantel.
Gina Grant’s boyfriend, a sixteen-year-old named Jack Hook, pleaded no contest to the charge of accessory to voluntary manslaughter after his fingerprints were found on the knife in Gina’s mother’s throat. Prosecutors believe that after Gina killed her mother Hook came over to the house and helped her make the death look like a suicide by stabbing Mrs. Mayfield, who was already dead, and then wrapping her right hand around the knife. Hook served nearly a year in a juvenile detention center, was subsequently arrested on new charges, of grand larceny, and is now serving a ten-year sentence in an adult high-security prison. (Hook declined, through his lawyer, to comment on Gina Grant unless he was paid, but he told one syndicated TV magazine show that Grant had lied about him. He also said he knew nothing about any abuse by her mother.)
Donald Myers, the prosecutor in the case, agreed to accept Gina Grant’s plea to a lesser charge than murder because, he acknowledges, he was afraid that she would be acquitted. “To tell you the truth,” Myers says, “I would have been afraid of a not-guilty verdict because of the whole victim thing. She is very convincing, and in this county people believe in self-defense.” Grant’s defense attorney also had reasons for bargaining. The coverup at the crime scene, along with her changing stories, created problems. Particularly disturbing was a statement she gave that falsely pinned the murder on Hook. Even worse, Hook’s mother had taped Gina confessing to her on the phone that she had falsely accused him, in what Gina described as a gambit designed to get them both off.
The greatest surprise in the case was the lenient sentence imposed by Judge Westbrook. Despite a reputation for toughness, he sentenced Gina Grant to about a year of incarceration, including her pretrial detention. In September of 1991, he released her on probation, until the age of eighteen, into the custody of the Bennetts, in Massachusetts, who promised to enroll her in a residential treatment center for girls considered dangerous to themselves or to others. Gina lived at the treatment center only a few months, undergoing psychotherapy, while she was attending Rindge and Latin.
By taking Gina Grant out of the hands of the overcrowded and understaffed Department of Youth Services in South Carolina, Judge Westbrook stirred up a furor, and won the lasting hostility of the state’s juvenile-parole board, which believed that its authority was being undercut. As the parole board saw it, Gina Grant needed not just rehabilitation but punishment. “In the final analysis, people are responsible for the choices they make about their own actions,” Richard McLawhorn, then the Department of Youth Services commissioner, wrote in a letter to Allen Bennett in August, 1991. “And teen-agers are no exception. They need to understand that principle and not see themselves as hapless victims whose antisocial actions should be excused because of their backgrounds.” Not only did the parole board refuse to accept the idea that Gina Grant was a victim; it found the arguments made in her favor, such as her superior intelligence and the community support she had received, to be aggravating rather than mitigating circumstances. “We have many, many children who have been abused physically or emotionally who don’t commit crimes this brutal,” Marlene McClain, the board’s chairwoman, says. “And, with the resources and intelligence she had, I have to believe she could have found other solutions.”
In many respects, the fight over Gina Grant’s sentence presaged the later battle over her admission to Harvard, forcing participants into taking sides between condemnation and redemption. Judge Westbrook, though he did not excuse her behavior, focussed on her potential, which he believed would be squandered if she were to be locked up in South Carolina. Every judicial sentence requires a prediction of the future, and Westbrook gambled that Gina Grant would, if she was given therapy and the chance to continue her education, go on to lead a useful life. After she left the state, he assumed—since her court files were confidential—that unless she was again charged with a crime she would never have to tell anyone about her juvenile record: she would be free to start a new life.
When Gina Grant applied to Harvard, she put this principle to the test. She immediately faced the dilemma of how much to say, and decided to tell virtually no one about her past, including her high-school teachers and administrators, some of whom subsequently wrote enthusiastic college recommendations for her. Her aunt and uncle knew, of course, but shortly before her senior year she had had such a severe falling out with them that they had forced her out of their house, and she went to live in an apartment on her own. Neither Gina nor the Bennetts will comment on the nature of the fight, which, of course, raised anew the spectre that, no matter how well Gina was doing academically, she still had disturbingly unresolved emotional problems. Gina’s choice of boyfriend appears to have again been an issue, and so were limits that the Bennetts tried to place on her. And again Gina has a number of defenders; they see her in this dispute, too, as the victim of unreasonable relatives. In any case, the rupture between Gina and the Bennetts was a bitter one.
Besides the Bennetts and her therapists, perhaps the only people in Cambridge who knew of Gina’s past were her high-school boyfriend, a fellow honor student named Liam Case, and his parents, John and Quaker Case. Gina herself had told Liam when she felt that their relationship had become serious, and he’d had a traumatic reaction. She decided to tell his parents, too, though she was apparently terrified that by confessing she would lose what had become her surrogate family. But John Case, a business writer who graduated from Harvard in 1966, and his wife, Quaker, who is a psychiatric social worker, continue to support Gina wholeheartedly.
When it was time for Gina to fill out college applications, she turned to the Cases for advice. As they understood the law, her record was confidential. They believed she had served her time and had proved her ability to excel in the outside world. So they advised her not to disclose her juvenile record. Later, when an alumna interviewer asked her how her mother had died, Gina used what had apparently become her standard response to this question: “In an accident.” Because she had pleaded no contest to manslaughter, which is a killing without malice aforethought, she apparently rationalized that the circumlocution was technically correct.
Gina’s current attorney, Margaret Burnham, argues that in declining to disclose her past Gina was following Massachusetts law, which, she says, explicitly bars educational institutions from asking questions of applicants about any criminal matters not resulting in convictions. Since juveniles are “adjudicated delinquent” rather than “convicted” (the latter term is used only for adult offenders), Burnham contends, Gina Grant had no obligation to be more forthcoming. “Clearly, when the judge sent her away from Lexington he believed that she would have the advantage of anonymity,” Burnham says. “And Gina accepted that she was to have a fresh start. These are the first principles of juvenile justice.” On the other hand, Alan Rose, a Boston attorney specializing in educational matters, argues that those “first principles” do not bind the Harvard admissions office. “Harvard is entitled to establish rules about who should go to school there,” he says. “And on the top of the list of applicants you’d screen out are any who have directed bodily harm at anyone else.”
The issue was hypothetical until Monday, April 3, 1995, when Harvard’s admissions officers held a rare emergency meeting to consider the contents of an envelope that had been dropped off by hand the Friday before, together with an anonymous letter. Perhaps not coincidentally, an article about young people who had triumphed over long odds—an article that featured Gina Grant but did not mention her juvenile record—had appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine on April 2nd. The anonymous letter that Harvard received accused Gina Grant of “hoodwinking” a succession of institutions, beginning with the South Carolina judicial system, continuing with her Cambridge high school, and concluding with Harvard itself. It mentioned that she was estranged from her guardians, and described her as a deceitful, manipulative personality who had covered up the fact that she had killed her own mother. Accompanying the letter was a set of four-year-old news clippings from South Carolina detailing the case.
The admissions committee voted to revoke Gina Grant’s acceptance on the ground that she had “made material misrepresentations” about herself, and Harvard thereupon drafted a rejection letter. Worried that the news might leave her in a state of despair, the admissions committee arranged to have it delivered to her in the company of her high-school guidance counsellor. But Gina, instead of despairing, demanded an opportunity to discuss the committee’s reasons in person, perhaps hoping that she would be able to change their minds. Harvard, however, refused to allow her to meet with the admissions committee. She was told that the university wished her good luck—but someplace else.
It appears that another college will give Gina Grant a second chance. Before her juvenile record became known, Columbia, Barnard, and Tufts had all eagerly accepted her. Then, when Harvard’s rejection became public, the others, too, developed serious qualms. None would comment on their admissions procedures, but last week Tufts confirmed that, after much consideration, it would stand by its offer of admission for this coming fall.
But, as Harvard’s reaction suggests, even if Gina Grant excels at Tufts and never again raises a hand against another living soul, the concept of a clean slate may be a legal fiction. The problem, Paul Mones notes, is that “most of these children who have killed their parents have been treated violently and told they’re worthless by their parents. And in the eyes of society they’ve proved that their parents were right.” ♦
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