Immigration practices, police abuse, the death penalty, prison conditions, and issues of discrimination continue to be some of the most serious human rights violations in the United States.
The U.S. Border Patrol and other immigration officials along the U.S.-Mexico border continued to commit human rights violations such as unjustified shootings, sexual assaults, and beatings. At the same time, serious incidents of police abuse in cities around the country have been reported. Weak processes of civilian review, flawed internal investigations, and the rarity of criminal prosecutions created an atmosphere in which brutal officers had little reason to fear punishment of any type.
"Frequently the officers involved in the most serious violations have long histories showing that they were disobeying the police department's rules -- and sometimes the law," said Allyson Collins, Human Rights Watch's senior researcher for U.S. issues.
Ignoring the international trend away from capital punishment, U.S. states carried out executions at a record pace in 1997, with seventy-four men executed, half of them in Texas. In March 1997, Pedro Medina was executed in Florida using an electric chair that malfunctioned, setting his head ablaze. Florida courts held that executions should continue, despite the repeated malfunctions. During 1997, two Mexican nationals were put to death in Texas and Virginia, and in both cases state officials failed to notify defendants of their right to contact Mexican consulates--in violation of the Vienna Convention. During the first three months of 1998, Texas and Florida each executed a woman from death row, ending a de facto moratorium on executing women since 1984. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, only one other woman has been executed. The United States is one of only six countries in the world that execute people for acts committed before the age of eighteen; the other five are Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. At present, fifty-eight such people are on death row.
The United States continued to incarcerate a greater proportion of its people than almost any other country in the world, with one of every 163 U.S. residents behind bars. At the end of 1996, the number of prisoners and jail inmates reached a new high of approximately 1.7 million, double the incarcerated population in 1985. Notably, racial disparities in the rate of incarceration continued to worsen. African-Americans, who made up 51 percent of the national prison population, were incarcerated at a rate 7.5 times that of whites.
Questions for President Bill Clinton: When a United Nations Special Rapporteur investigated the application of the death penalty in the U.S. last year, federal and state officials provided very little assistance. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson told reporters that the report would simply collect dust on a shelf somewhere. Now that the report has been released, how will the U.S. use or respond to the Special Rapporteur's findings? Does the U.S. believe it should be subjected to inspections by the same United Nations human rights experts who conduct these types of missions in other countries?