Young, privileged and facing death row

In the eastern United States, at least, executions remain relatively rare. The exception is Delaware, a sliver of a state that gives its condemned a choice between death by injection or the hangman's rope. Last week, it found two new faces it would like on Death Row. These faces, though, offer no hint of evil - no scars or grizzled brows - but speak instead of youthful innocence. And therein lies the shock.

Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson are the quintessence of well-to-do, middle-class America. Both are 18 years old and good-looking - Brian did some modelling as a toddler - and seemed to have the future at their fingertips. At their high school in a prosperous patch of New Jersey suburbia, they formed a popular and handsome couple. He was a co-captain of the soccer team. Her excellence in maths gave her a job as a tutor. They were, as one friend said, the "preps" on the school campus.

The pair are accused of premeditated murder, and their privileged world has been shattered. It is a nose-dive from nonchalance that has seized the attention of America. If these were ghetto kids - especially, it must be said, if they were black - it would assuredly offer America less fascination. But in this educated world of country clubs and teen dances, such things are not meant to happen. Here it did, though, and we are reminded that there is immunity for nobody - not from unexpected derailment into crime and not even, in this country at least, from the threat of the ultimate sanction - death.

This crash began last summer, when Amy and Brian were graduating from school and preparing to go to college - the University of Delaware in Newark in her case, and Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania in his. Amy discovered she was pregnant. Her reaction was hardly rare - she dared not reveal her condition to her parents or friends, presumably out of shame. But instead of seeking a secret abortion, as one might expect, or making inquiries about having the baby adopted, Amy did precisely nothing beyond wearing baggy clothes to disguise the swelling bump in her belly.

It was a journey in self-denial that eventually brought the pair to a cheap Newark motel room in the pre-dawn hours of 12 November.

The murder charges filed against the couple by Newark police offer the only version of events so far available to us. Brian is said to have driven at night the three hours from Gettysburg to Amy's student dormitory and taken her from there to the motel. They checked in, and during the night, Brian apparently helped Amy deliver a baby boy. Brian allegedly put the infant into a plastic bin-liner, drawn the strings and deposited it in a rubbish skip behind the hotel. Amy returned to her dormitory and Brian to Gettysburg.

There, the story might have died along with the child. The authorities learned, however, that a baby was missing, and subsequently found it in the skip after Amy was checked in to a Newark hospital for treatment for complications suffered from childbirth. Brian, meanwhile, had gone to a student counsellor and admitted the crime. He was held briefly by police but was released without charge. He told the police that the child was alive when he dumped it.

The drama was catapulted into the headlines last Monday when, after her release from care, Amy was placed under arrest and the first-degree murder charges (which can carry a death penalty) were filed against her and her boyfriend. The state was acting on the findings of an autopsy which suggested that something much more violent had occurred in the motel room - the bludgeoning to death of the newborn.

To quote the autopsy report: "The cause of death has been determined to be multiple fractures with injury to the brain due to blunt-force head trauma and shaking". Two other things followed - the assistant attorney general of Delaware, Donald Roberts, called for the death penalty; not surprisingly, perhaps, Brian, for whom an arrest warrant had been issued, vanished. On Tuesday, he was officially declared a fugitive.

If the couple can be said in any way to have had bad luck, it was in Amy's choice of university - in Delaware instead of her native New Jersey. Delaware has already executed three Death Row inmates this year - including one by hanging - and it has the distinction of having the highest execution rate in the US. Delaware is also one of only four states where a court does not require unanimity in a jury to pass a death sentence and where, in addition, a judge seeking death can overrule a jury seeking a lesser sentence.

Among 20 sets of circumstances under which prosecutors in the state are entitled to seek the death penalty, moreover, one is for the murder of children under the age of 14. "Delaware wants to do a Texas but on the east coast," Michael Dowd, a New York defence lawyer, remarked in reference to that state's long-held reputation for dispatching its worst criminals.

Mr Dowd is the lawyer who earlier this year won probation for Caroline Beale, the British woman who spent eight months in a New York jail on charges of murdering her baby at birth in a hotel room and attempting to smuggle its body onto a flight to London. He is dismayed by the apparent haste of assistant attorney Roberts in asking for the death penalty for Amy and Brian. "It's absurd because I don't think anyone can know what the facts are this early in the case," he said.

"The danger is that the prosecution will close its mind and rush to find evidence to support its demand for the death penalty." Noting that Mr Roberts appears undeterred, Mr Dowd added: "I think it's another grim reflection on the regressive American laws in this area." He is currently defending a black woman from the Bronx who threw her infant from a third- floor window. (Media interest in that case has been predictably scant).

To visualise what might have happened in the young couple's motel room is intolerable. You can only linger on the images of the physical acts for the briefest of flashes. It is hard not to wonder, however, about the mental anguish involved. Can the two teenagers really have been in control of all their faculties, carrying out a murder coldly premeditated? Were they acting on a motive that, as one New York columnist suggested, could most simply be put as "convenience" - a shared desire to get rid of some grit that was going to disrupt their otherwise well-heeled lives? Or were they in a state of psychosis bought on by utter confusion and fear of adult and peer rejection?

Most compelling is to speculate about the agonies that followed. Consider the unimaginable shock, for instance - and the instant gush of overwhelming guilt - of Amy's two parents. Her mother, Sonye, an interior designer, and her father, Allan, a furniture shop owner, must still be asking how could they not have known their daughter was pregnant and why could she not ask them for help?

Above all, imagine the 48 hours that Brian spent on the run before his surrender to the FBI on Thursday. According to his lawyer, Joseph Hurley, he disappeared with his mother and his father - they are divorced - to a secret home within two hours' drive of Wilmington. That could put us in Philadelphia or Washington DC. For that period, Brian, evidently, was in a daze. "Nothing is registering," Mr Hurley told reporters. "You tell a boy who is just out of high school that they want to stick a needle in his arm and put poison through it and he thinks, `This just can't be happening'".

His mother, meanwhile, was battling an urge to get her son out of the country - beyond the reach of a state that wanted to kill him. She even considered countries such as Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Syria which have no extradition treaties with the US. When Mr Hurley implored her to consider the kind of life he would have there, she replied: "At least he would have a life!"

Mr Hurley won the argument, and at 9.30am on Thursday, Brian and his two parents emerged from a car two blocks from the FBI building and walked slowly towards it. Only their expressions - fear mixed with incomprehension - belied their appearance as a perfect, attractive American family. Soon the chants start from the onlookers - "Baby killer! Baby Killer" - and Brian's mother, Barbara, cried out and buried her head in her son's shoulder. In all of the crowd, there was only one dissenting voice. It came from a woman, who called out: "Brian, you're in my prayers".