"The use of the death penalty for crimes committed by people younger than 18 is prohibited under international human rights law, yet some countries still execute child offenders. Such executions are few compared to the total number of executions in the world. Their significance goes beyond their number and calls into question the commitment of the executing states to respect international law.

Since 1990 Amnesty International has documented executions of child offenders in seven countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the USA and Yemen. At least two of these countries, Pakistan and Yemen, have since changed their laws to exclude the practice. The country which has carried out the greatest number of known executions is the USA."

USA

The country which has carried out more documented executions of child offenders than any other since 1990 is the USA.

In 1988 and 1989 the US Supreme Court ruled that the execution of people who were under 16 at the time of the crime was contrary to the US Constitution but that the execution of people aged 16 or 17 at the time of the crime was not.(31)

Fifteen US states were holding a total of 82 child offenders on death row as of August 2002. Eighteen executions of child offenders have been carried out in six states since 1990. One of those executed was 16 at the time of the offence; the others were all 17. Eleven of the executions were in Texas, the state which has carried out the largest total number of executions of prisoners since the resumption of executions in the USA in 1977 -- 281 up to 17 September 2002.

The background of most of the child offenders executed since 1990 was one of serious emotional or material deprivation. Many were regular users of drugs or alcohol with lower than average intelligence. Some had organic brain damage. Some had poor or inexperienced legal counsel. Highly relevant information was withheld at their trials due to incompetence or inexperience on the part of their lawyers.

Brief details of the 18 cases are given below. The prisoners’ race or ethnic grouping and the state are indicated in square brackets.

Dalton Prejean [black, Louisiana], sentenced to death in 1978 and executed in 1990. He was 17 years old at the time of the murder of a police officer in 1977. Prejean was tried before an all-white jury and represented by a court-appointed lawyer. At his trial, evidence was presented of intellectual impairment. His IQ was measured at 71. He was abandoned by his mother at the age of two weeks and was raised by a relative who was reportedly violent. From the age of 13 he spent time in institutions and was diagnosed as suffering from various mental illnesses including schizophrenia. At age 14 he was committed to an institution for killing a taxi driver. Medical opinion recommended long-term hospitalization under strict supervision. He was nevertheless released after three years, reportedly because of lack of funds to keep him institutionalised. Despite appeals for clemency in 1989 and 1990 he was electrocuted on 18 May 1990, 12 years after being sentenced to death.

Johnny Garrett [white, Texas], executed in 1992. He was convicted of the murder in 1981of a 76-year-old white nun. He had a long history of mental illness and was severely sexually and physically abused as a child. This history was not revealed at the trial. Between 1986 and 1992, three medical experts reported that he was chronically psychotic and brain-damaged as a result of head injuries sustained as a child. Appeals for clemency from Pope John Paul II and from the Franciscan Sisters religious community to which the murdered nun belonged were to no avail and Johnny Garrett was executed by lethal injection on 11 February 1992.

Curtis Harris [black, Texas], executed in 1993. He was 17 years old at the time of the crime - the murder of a white man in 1978. He was one of nine children brought up in extreme poverty. He was regularly beaten as a child by an alcoholic father. At the trial, three black jurors were excluded; his jury was all white. He was sentenced to death in 1979. His conviction was overturned, he was retried and sentenced to death again in 1983. In 1986 he was examined by Dr Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine, who found that he had a low IQ (77) and had organic brain damage resulting from beatings suffered as a child. None of the information about his upbringing or mental capacity was raised by his lawyer at the original trial. His appeals against the sentence failed and he was executed on 1 July 1993.

Frederick Lashley [black, Missouri], executed in 1993. He was the first child offender to be executed in Missouri for 60 years when he was subjected to lethal injection on 28 July 1993. He was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury in 1982 for the murder of his cousin in 1981. He was under the influence of drugs at the time of the killing. He had been abandoned at a young age by his mother and had been brought up by relatives. He began drinking alcohol heavily at the age of 10 and at the time of the crime was homeless. At his trial he was represented by a lawyer who had never previously acted in a capital case.

Christopher Burger [white, Georgia], executed in 1993. He was the first child offender to be executed in Georgia under its current death penalty law. He was 17 at the time of the murder, committed in 1977, for which he was convicted. He was sentenced to death in 1978. The sentence was vacated but a new sentencing hearing was held and in 1979 he was again sentenced to death. Fourteen years later he was executed by electrocution.

At his trial he was represented by a lawyer who had not previously acted in a capital case. Although US juries are required to consider mitigating factors in deciding whether to impose a death sentence, Christopher Burger's lawyer did not present mitigating evidence at the sentencing hearings in either 1978 or 1979. The jury was therefore not told that Christopher Burger had a low IQ, that he was mentally ill and brain damaged from physical abuse received as a child, or that he suffered from a highly disturbed, unstable upbringing and had attempted suicide at the age of 15.

In 1989, Dr Dorothy Otnow Lewis of the New York University School of Medicine examined Christopher Burger and found organic brain impairment and mental illness. He was scheduled to be executed on 18 December 1990 but received a last-minute stay of execution pending an appeal based on the issue of his mental competence at the time of the crime. The appeal failed and he was executed on 7 December 1993.

Ruben Cantu [Latino, Texas], sentenced to death in 1984 and executed in 1993. He was 17 at the time of the offence. He was represented by an inexperienced lawyer, had a troubled family upbringing and was of limited intellectual capacity.

Joseph John Cannon [white, Texas], executed in 1998 for the murder of Anne Walsh in 1977. He was sentenced to death in 1980. The conviction was overturned in 1981. He was retried and sentenced to death again in 1982. At the age of four, Joseph Cannon was hit by a truck and left hyperactive, with a head injury and a speech impediment. Unable to function in the classroom, he was expelled from school at the age of six or seven and received no other formal education. He turned to glue sniffing and other solvent abuse, and at age 10 he was diagnosed as suffering from organic brain damage. Suffering from severe depression, he attempted suicide at the age of 15. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and borderline mentally retarded. From the age of seven up to the time of the murder for which he was sentenced to death, Joseph Cannon suffered repeated and severe sexual abuse from male relatives. So brutal and abusive was his upbringing that Joseph Cannon thrived better on death row, where he learned to read and write, than he ever had in his home environment. By the time he was killed, Joseph Cannon had spent more than half his life on death row.

Robert Anthony Carter [black, Texas], sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of Sylvia Reyes in 1981 and executed in 1998. One of six children in one of the poorest families of an impoverished Houston neighbourhood, Robert Carter was abused throughout his childhood. His mother and stepfather would whip and beat the children with wooden switches, belts and electric cords. At the age of five he was hit on the head with a brick. At the age of 10 he was hit so hard on the head with a baseball bat that the bat broke. He received no medical attention for these injuries. In an incident shortly before the murder of Sylvia Reyes, Robert Carter was shot in the head by his brother, the bullet lodging near his temple. He afterwards suffered seizures and fainting spells.

At his trial, the prosecution took one day to present its entire case. At the sentencing, during which the prosecutor told the jury that life imprisonment would be like a "slap on the wrist", the jury was not invited to consider as mitigating evidence Robert Carter’s age at the time of the crime; the fact that he was borderline mentally retarded, brain damaged and had suffered brutal physical abuse as a child; or that this was his first offence. The jurors took 10 minutes to decide that he should die.

Dwayne Allen Wright [black, Virginia], sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder of Saba Tekle in 1989 and executed in 1998. Dwayne Wright grew up in a poor family in a deprived neighbourhood of the US capital, Washington DC, rife with criminal drugs activity, where he witnessed habitual gun violence and murder. From the age of four, Dwayne Wright lost his father to incarceration in prison. His mother, who suffered from mental illness, was often unemployed for long periods. When he was 10, his 23-year-old half-brother, to whom he was very close, was murdered. After this Dwayne Wright developed serious emotional problems. He did poorly at school. Between the ages of 12 and 17, he spent periods in hospital and juvenile detention facilities. During this time he was treated for "major depression with psychotic episodes"; his mental capacity was evaluated as borderline retarded, his verbal ability as retarded; and doctors found signs of organic brain damage.

The American Bar Association was among the organizations which appealed for clemency for Dwayne Wright, stating that his proposed execution "demeans our system of justice" and that "a borderline mentally retarded child simply cannot be held to the same degree of culpability and accountability for the actions to which we would hold an adult."

Sean Sellers [white, Oklahoma], sentenced to death in 1981 for shooting his mother and stepfather and a shopkeeper and executed in 1999. He was the first person since 1959 to be executed in the USA for a crime committed at 16 years of age. Born to a 16-year-old mother and raised by various relatives, he was exposed to violence and physical abuse from an early age and became involved with drugs and Satanism. In post-conviction examinations, he was found to be chronically psychotic and to have symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia and other major mood disorders. He was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder in 1992. On death row he became very religious and engaged in writing and artwork with a view to helping others learn from his experience. One of his trial jurors appealed for clemency, recalling that the jury never believed that he would be executed but that they feared his early release if they sentenced him to life imprisonment. The trial judge had refused to allow expert testimony that a sentence of life imprisonment would have meant at least 15 years in prison before he would become eligible for parole.

Chris Thomas [white, Virginia], sentenced to death in 1991 and executed in 2000. After his adoptive parents died when he was 12, Chris Thomas became involved in petty offending and drug abuse. Psychological reports described him as an isolated, angry, depressed, alienated teenager. His intense relationship with 14-year-old Jessica Wiseman culminated in their plan to kill her parents. Without an adult present, while still under the effects of alcohol and drugs, and having slept for only two hours in the previous 40, Thomas confessed to both murders. He later said he had not fired the second fatal shot at the mother, whose killing resulted in Chris Thomas’ death sentence (he received a life sentence for the murder of the father). The jury never heard evidence that Jessica Wiseman may have fired this shot. She was released in 1997 at the age of 21.

Steve Roach [white, Virginia], executed in 2000. He had been sentenced to death in 1995 for the 1993 shooting of Mary Ann Hughes, his only recorded act of violence. Born into a family with frequently absent parents, Roach dropped out of school at 14 because they wanted him to do chores. An expert testified at trial that Roach had poor impulse control and was particularly immature as a result of the lack of structure in his home life. Arguing that Roach was a future danger, the prosecution cited his parole violation in possessing a shotgun as a sign of his future dangerousness, despite the fact that no adult, including the police, had seen fit to remove it from him.

Glen McGinnis [black, Texas], sentenced to death in 1992 and executed in 2000. Glen McGinnis was born to a mother who was addicted to crack cocaine and who worked out of their one-bedroom flat as a prostitute. He suffered repeated physical abuse at her hands and those of his stepfather, who raped him when he was nine or 10. He ran away from home at the age of 11 and lived on the streets of Houston where he engaged in shoplifting and car theft. He was sentenced to death by an all-white jury for the shooting of Leta Ann Wilkerson, white, during a robbery in 1990. Various juvenile correctional officials testified that he was non-aggressive even in the face of taunts about his homosexuality from other inmates and that he had the capacity to flourish in the structured environment of prison.

Gary Graham [black, Texas], sentenced to death in 1981 and executed in 2000 amid massive national and international media attention. He was born to a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father and was exposed to violence from an early age in the poor neighbourhood of Houston where he grew up. He became involved in drug and alcohol abuse and by the age of 15 had a juvenile record for thefts. In 1981, aged 17, he was under arrest for a string of armed robberies and aggravated assaults when he was charged with the murder of Bobby Lambert, white, the crime for which a jury of 11 whites and one black sentenced him to die. He was represented by lawyers too busy to defend a client they apparently assumed was guilty because of the other crimes to which he admitted. Their failure meant that Gary Graham was convicted on the testimony of a single eyewitness whose credibility they never scrutinized. Gary Graham’s lawyers failed to question suggestive police techniques used in obtaining her identification of Graham. They neglected to interview other, better-placed witnesses, none of whom identified him as the gunman and several of whom said he was not the gunman. No physical evidence linked Gary Graham to the shooting. The jury never heard forensic evidence that a gun found on him at the time of his arrest could not have fired the fatal bullet.

No hearing was ever been held into whether Graham’s 19-year claim of innocence was supported by such evidence. Two of the trial jurors signed affidavits that they would not have voted for death if they had been presented with such evidence.

Gerald Mitchell [black, Texas], sentenced to death in 1986 and executed in 2001. Gerald Mitchell was on death row for 15 years after being convicted by an all-white jury for the murder of a white man, committed when he was 17 years old. Evidence presented at trial indicated that Mitchell had been assessed as having an IQ of 75 and had a long history of substance abuse.

Napoleon Beazley [black, Texas], sentenced to death in 1985 and executed in 2002. He was sentenced to death in 1995 for the murder of a white man in Tyler, Texas, committed when he was 17 years old. He had no prior arrest record and the state produced no evidence of any other assaultive acts by him. He was tried by an all-white jury. One of the jurors was later shown to harbour severe prejudice against African Americans. There was evidence that another was a long-term employee of one of the victim's business partners, which was not revealed during jury selection. Two co-defendants later said that their testimony at the trial, central to the prosecution's bid for a death sentence, had been false and was made under pressure from a prosecutor needing to cast the defendant in as bad a light as possible in front of the jury. The prosecutor repeatedly referred to Beazley as a predatory "animal" in front of the jury. Many witnesses testified at his trial about good aspects of his character and his potential for rehabilitation. He was a model prisoner.

T.J. Jones [black, Texas], sentenced to death in 1994 and executed in 2002 for the murder of a white man during a carjacking. Jones was assessed as having an IQ of 78, and to be particularly immature for his age at the time of the crime. According to an expert at the trial, his "grossly poor judgment" was compounded by alcohol and drug abuse which began at the age of 13.

Toronto Patterson [black, Texas], sentenced to death in 1995 and executed in 2002. Toronto Patterson was sentenced to death for the killing of three-year-old Ollie Brown, whose body was found in her home in Dallas in June 1995 along with that of her sister and their mother. All three, who were cousins of Toronto Patterson, had been shot. After his arrest, the 17-year-old Toronto Patterson gave police a statement without a lawyer present, in which he admitted to being present at the scene of the crime but not to having committed the murders themselves. After being held incommunicado for over four hours, and subjected to aggressive interrogation, Toronto Patterson confessed to the shootings. He claimed at his 1995 trial that the confession had been coerced, and in his final statement before being executed in 2002, maintained his innocence of the murders.

In its concluding observations on the initial report of the USA under the ICCPR, adopted in 1995, the UN Human Rights Committee deplored "provisions in the legislation of a number of [US] states which allow the death penalty to be pronounced for crimes committed by persons under 18 and the actual instances where such sentences have been pronounced and executed". It exhorted the authorities "to take appropriate steps to ensure that persons are not sentenced to death for crimes committed before they were 18". (32)

and the USE of humane executions...well, if we were to execute them the way they killed their victims...would we be any better? any?

here we freakin go again!!

your point?

I saw that adj, and yes, that is a sad possibility, but isn't less falible then what ew have now where it is not about the truth, but which lawyer can lie the best? If the semen found on a vitim matches the culprit, worst case a child being the victim, use dna instead of the blood sucker that is defending the sicko that did the crime......we can talk/argue/whatever all day long. Nothing is a perfect way, but if one way has more of a chance of doing good, then I swing in that direction.

I saw that adj, and yes, that is a sad possibility, but isn't less falible then what ew have now where it is not about the truth, but which lawyer can lie the best? If the semen found on a vitim matches the culprit, worst case a child being the victim, use dna instead of the blood sucker that is defending the sicko that did the crime......we can talk/argue/whatever all day long. Nothing is a perfect way, but if one way has more of a chance of doing good, then I swing in that direction.

sorry for the double post, didn't mean to take up so much space.....

well if my son committed a murder (not self defense) then yeah they'd have to kill him. i wouldnt feel any different

i agree with doing it publicly. in islamic countries like saudi arabia they put a notice in the paper when they are gonna execute someone or even shop a hand off for stealing. then they do it in the town square on friday, thier holy day and everyone can come watch.
may be ruff on a child to watch, but i think its a deterrent to them.

Just one small case that msot likely unless your around my age or have read about it then alot might not know this think it was in 1975 Charles Manson his cult members he had them all so brain washed they would do anything for him well they ended up killing think a around 7 or so people that had showed up for a party at Sharon Tates home. Sharon Tate at the time was 7-8 months pregnant they actually strung her up in the living room with rope she was still alive they took a knife cut her open and left the baby also on the floor to die as well can you even picture having that done and be alive ohh Charles Manson trial was in Calif they had just passed the law banning the death penalty after he was tried so guess what Charles Manson to this very day is still in the Calif Prison he has been keep in solitar confinment all these years due to they are afraid he would get hurt in the open public area. Anywho I can still understand those that are agaist the death penalty and I respect the way you think.

AMEN viva, don & txs.......

It does disturb me that innocent people are wrongly convicted but nothing is infallible.As for public executions why give someone more fame than they deserve??

Flipping Saddam was publically hanged, yet they won't show it here! After so many of ouor soldiers dies to find that sicko, we and the famlies of the soldier were JIPPED of the satisfaction of seeing that F**ker swing!

i remember chrlie, i was stationed in sacramento at the time.
they should have wacked them all, even squeaky and the other girls.
as i recall wasn't squeaky that tried to shot when of the presidents in sacramento? ford wasn't it??

Thanks creations..I hope they are caught, and put behind bars..and when their time comes, I hope I'm there to where it's my eyes they see when they take their last breath. The justice system today has gotten so bad here that crime has gotten out of hand and nothing is being done about it. I have respect for some of the law enforcement, but there are some who do nothing but draw a pay check. I taught my son the same thing as Sage has..if you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime..it's that simple.

lildevil I agree except: fame vs. deterrent I go with deterrent.........and yes I know I have been having a typo day

eye for an eye. thats all ive got to say.

yeah so lets put up an abortion forum. lets really get the pot stirred.

never had one and as for others,none of my buisness.

why should someone who has murdered be allowed to suck air and waste food when thier victom is in the ground?