Human Rights Watch today called on Virginia's governor to grant clemency to prevent an execution scheduled for tomorrow that violates international law. Douglas Christopher Thomas, convicted in 1990 for crimes committed when he was only seventeen years old, will be executed by lethal injection unless Governor James Gilmore intervenes.
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Children are different from adults. They don't have an adult's maturity, experience, or judgment. No one should be executed for crimes committed as a minor.
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Children are different from adults," said Michael Bochenek, counsel to the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. "They don't have an adult's maturity, experience, or judgment. No one should be executed for crimes committed as a minor."
The United States is one of the few countries that defy the worldwide consensus that the death penalty should not be imposed on juvenile offenders. Since 1990, only five other countries—Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen—are known to have executed juvenile offenders. The United States has executed nine juvenile offenders in this decade, more than the reported total for any other nation in the world.
Human Rights Watch's letter to Governor Gilmore also expressed concern that Thomas's case was transferred out of the juvenile courts without a full and impartial hearing and that the jury that imposed the death sentence never considered Thomas's developmental immaturity and other important mitigating circumstances.
