Abolish The Death Penalty

The U.S. leads the world in killing kids: Since 1990, only six countries have executed people for crimes they committed as children: Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, and the United States. The U.S. has executed more children than any of the other countries. Every major international human rights treaty expressly prohibits execution for crimes committed before the age of 18. At least 160 children have been sentenced to death in the U.S. since 1973. Government electrocution, gassing and lethal injection of kids doubled in the last decade. There’s no limit to how low we can go: The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the execution of children as young as sixteen is not “cruel and unusual” punishment. It has yet to make a definitive statement about children under sixteen. Of the thirty-eight states with the death penalty, fifteen have set the minimum age for death at 18, five set the minimum at seventeen, and seventeen have a minimum age of sixteen. The Federal Government sets the minimum age at eighteen. In 1996, Mississippi prosecutors sought the death penalty for juveniles thirteen years of age. Most often the U.S. kills children of color: Two out of three children sent to death row are people of colour. Historically, two out of three people executed for crimes they committed as children have been African-American. During this century, the ratio has jumped to three out of four. Of the nine girls executed in U.S. history, eight were Black and one was American Indian. The youngest person executed in the U.S. since WWII was George Stinney, a fourteen year old black boy who was so small his mask fell off while he was being electrocuted by the state of South Carolina. The Federal Government has imposed the death penalty against American Indian children for crimes they committed as young as ten years old. NCADP