Human Rights Watch today urged Georgia to commute the death sentence of Alexander Williams, convicted of murder at the age of seventeen. Williams, who is mentally ill, is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday, February 20.
Nobody should be put to death for a crime committed as a teenager," said Michael Bochenek, counsel to the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. "The fact that Alexander Williams is also mentally ill makes the state's decision to execute him even more reprehensible."
Outside of the United States, only the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iran are known to have executed juvenile offenders in the last three years. International law prohibits capital punishment for offenses committed below the age of eighteen.
Even in the United States, juvenile offenders are rarely put to death. Nationally, a total of eighteen juvenile offenders have been executed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Of the approximately 20,000 executions carried out in U.S. history, less than 2 percent are known to have been of juvenile offenders.
Georgia was the leading state in executions of juvenile offenders until 1957, but it has executed only one other juvenile offender in the past forty-five years. That execution took place in 1993.
When juvenile offenders are sentenced to death in Georgia, they are disproportionately black defendants who are convicted of killing white victims. In August, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination noted the "disturbing correlation" between race and the imposition of the death penalty in the United States, urging it to ensure that racial bias does not taint the sentencing process.
Williams' case also raises concerns because his mental illness and a history of abuse as a child were never presented to the jury. His defense lawyer, who made no effort to investigate these facts, has since been removed from the state courts' list of attorneys who are qualified to handle criminal cases.
Williams faced execution in August 2000, but the Georgia Supreme Court granted him a stay while it considered another case that challenged the constitutionality of the state's use of the electric chair. The state now uses lethal injection as its method of execution.
