U.S.A. accused of executing minors

Press, 21 February 1987, Page 33

U.S.A. accused of executing minors

By

STEVE JAMES

NZPA-Reuter New York Amnesty International, charging that the United States is one of only five countries that executes minors, has attacked the American death penalty as arbitrary, racially biased, and a violation of international accords.

The human rights organisation said the death penalty in the United States had become “a horrifying lottery” in which politics, money, race and where the crime was committed could decide whether a defendant went to the death chamber. In a harsh indictment of the American judicial system, Amnesty deplored the fact that several persons executed or awaiting the death penalty ,were mentally ill or were under the age of 18. “The imposition of death sentences on people who were under 18 at the time of the crime is a clear violation of international treaties and guidelines,” the organisation said in a 245-page report oh capital punishment in the United States. Such restrictions were included in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights, both signed by the United States in 1977.

Amnesty said three minors were executed between September, 1985, and May, 1986. "These executions put the United States but of line with most other death-penalty countries which do not execute people who were minors at the time of the crime,”

the report saicj. It said only eight executions of minors were reported since 1980 — three in the United States, two in Pakistan, and one each in Bangladesh, Barbados and Rwanda. Amnesty said there were . unconfirmed reports of minors executed in Iran.

At a press conference to launch the report, two Nobel Peace Prize winners joined in condemnation of American executions..

“The United States has always been regarded as a bastion of democracy,” said a former Amnesty chairman and Irish Cabinet minister,Sean McBride. “It is unfortunate the death penalty is permitted

... in the 1 land that claims leadership of the free world,” he told reporters. Then, in a telephone link with South Africa, Desmond Ttitu, Archbishop of Johannesburg, said there were comparisons with the way capital punishment was applied to blacks in South Africa and the United States. “There is a clear corellation in ... divisions and racial injustice manifested in the death penalty,” he said.

The Amnesty report, which began a world-wide campaign against capital punishment, said the number of executions in the United States was increasing — 57 in the last three years compared with 11 in the previous sdven since the Supreme Court rule that states could reintroduce capital punishment.

Thirty-seven states have the death penalty on the

Statute Books although only 12,.mostly in the south, have made executions since 1977. Texas

and Florida, with 34 between them, head the list In Washington, a Justice Department spokesman had no official comment on the report and said queries on specific cases should be referred to the individual states. Recently, however, the Justice Department urged a Congressionally created commission to recommend the death penalty for certain Federal crimes.

The Amnesty International report said a re-

cord 1838 prisoners were on death row at the end of 1986, waiting to see if they would be “electrocuted, gassed, poisoned, hanged or shot . dead.” That figure represented about 3 per cent of the total offenders convicted of homicide. The rest were generally serving life or long-term sentences.

In addition, nearly 90 per cent of the prisoners executed between ' 1977 and 1986 were blacks convicted of killing whites, even though there were almost as many black victims as white.

On sex discrimination, Amnesty said only 1 per cent of the death row

population was female although women committed 14 per cent of all criminal homicides.

The organisation said that in spite of attempts to “sanitise” executions by using modern methods, capital punishment was “a cruel and inhuman punishment, brutalising to all who are involved in the process” and cited severaf cases. An execution in Alabama in which the condemned man required three charges of 1400 volts before he died. At one point, smoke and flames erupted from his temple and leg. In Georgia in 1984, witnesses said the prisoner struggled, to breathe for eight minutes after the first two-minute charge of elecricity failed to kill him. In Mississippi, a prisoner had convulsions for eight minutes and witnesses claimed he was not dead when they were asked to leave the chamber. In Texas in 1984 a prisoner given a lethal injection took at least 10 minutes to die and complained of pain. Also in Texas, technicians took 40 minutes

searching a prisoner’s limbs for a suitable vein to insert the needle.