Human Rights Watch condemned Oklahoma's execution of Sean Sellers, who died by lethal injection early this morning. Sellers was convicted of three murders committed in 1986 when he was sixteen years old.
Again, the United States has put itself outside the bounds of accepted international standards by executing an individual for crimes committed before the age of eighteen," said Lois Whitman, executive director of the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. "We are deeply disappointed that neither Governor Keating nor the Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Paroles were willing to grant clemency to Sean Sellers. Their failure to do so puts our nation in the company of countries like Iran, Nigeria and Pakistan in defying a global consensus against such executions."
Human Rights Watch noted that this is the fourth juvenile offender executed in the United States in the past twelve months. During 1998, three individuals -- two in Texas and one in Virginia -- were executed for crimes committed at age seventeen. Sellers is the first individual in the United States in forty years to be executed for crimes committed at age sixteen.
No other country is known to have carried out judicial executions of juvenile offenders in 1998. Those put to death in the United States last year were Joseph Cannon, executed in Texas on April 22, Robert Anthony Carter, executed in Texas on May 18, and Dwight Allen Wright, executed in Virginia on October 14. All three individuals were not only juveniles at the time of their crime, but reportedly were also brain damaged.
"To put to death persons who were not only minors at the times of their crimes, but also suffer from brain damage or mental illness, violates the most basic principles of justice and morality," said Whitman.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which the United States is a party, expressly forbids capital punishment for offenders who were under the age of eighteen at the time of the offense for which they were convicted. Although the US conditioned its ratification of the ICCPR to allow it to continue this widely-rejected practice, other countries have criticized the US for entering this reservation against the spirit of the treaty. The use of the death penalty against juvenile offenders is also banned by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by every country in the world except for the United States and Somalia.
