Press Statement
For Immediate Release: Contact: Edward Jackson
January 21, 2004 (202) 544-0200 x302
(202) 251-3894 cell

Amnesty International USA Launches Campaign to STOP CHILD EXECUTIONS! (Washington, DC)—Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) today joined the more than one million Amnesty International activists worldwide to launch a global campaign focused on abolishing the death penalty for all child offenders – those who were under 18 at the time of their crime.

"International human rights norms proscribe sentencing children to death," said Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director, AIUSA. "The United States is currently one of a handful of countries that still executes juvenile offenders. However, even in the United States, there is a discernible move away from this heinous practice due to a greater awareness that children constitute a 'protected' class."

In the report issued today, Stop Child Executions! Ending the death penalty for child offenders, Amnesty International documents the executions of child offenders in eight countries since 1990: China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United States of America, and Yemen. Most of these countries have now changed their laws to ban the use of the juvenile death penalty leaving the US as the only country that openly acknowledges executing juvenile offenders and which claims for itself the right to do so.

Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia are the only states to have executed juvenile offenders since the death penalty was reinstated in the US in 1976. Combined, however, these states are responsible for 19 of the 34 juvenile executions to have occurred in the world since 1990. Since 1977, Texas has executed 13 juvenile offenders. Virginia trails Texas with 3 such executions.

In a related report issued today, Dead Wrong: The Case of Nanon Williams, Child Offender Facing Execution on Flawed Evidence Amnesty International focused on the case of juvenile offender Nanon Williams, who is on death row in Texas for a crime committed when he was 17. There are serious doubts about his guilt, and his case illustrates the deeper systemic problems of capital cases, including inadequate defense counsel and the state's use of unreliable evidence.

"The death penalty system is utterly flawed and ultimately futile," said Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn, Director of AIUSA's Program to Abolish the Death Penalty. "It is impossible to guarantee that innocent people are not being put to death, and Nanon Williams is one more in a growing list of cases where serious questions exist about the actual guilt of the convicted. The death penalty is an arbitrary and ineffective system at its very core and should be abolished in its entirety."

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