In June Amnesty International secretary general Ian Martin addressed the annual general meeting of the US section of Amnesty in Los Angeles. The following is an excerpt from his speech on human rights in the US, reported in the September issue of Amnesty International Australian Newsletter.
The US government is not only killing more of its own citizens, but is attempting to do so faster than ever before by curtailing the available appeals procedures. This is occurring even though it has long been clear that the application of the death penalty is arbitrary, unfair and racially discriminatory.
In April the US Supreme Court intervened to speed up the gassing of Robert Alton Harris in California by actually barring any other Federal Court from preventing the execution. Robert Harris was one of 19 prisoners executed in 10 states during the first six months of this year. Four of these states were carrying out their first execution in more than 25 years. More prisoners are on US death rows today than at any time in US history — 2588 as of April.
What interest of justice was served by electrocuting Nollie Martin in Florida on May 12? Severely brain damaged, often incoherent, he spent more than 13 years on death row rocking back and forth on the floor of his cell. He required constant medication for his mental illness and hallucinations. He beat his head and fists against the cell wall, and mutilated himself in remorse for his crime.
How did the spectacle of Ricky Ray Rector's execution in Arkansas on January 24 uphold civilised standards? As he lay strapped down for death, it took 50 agonising minutes to find a vein in which to inject the lethal poison. Witnesses
said they heard moans coming from the death chamber.
On May 20, as Roger Coleman was buckled into Virginia's electric chair, his last words were: "An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight. When my innocence is proved, I hope Americans will realise the injustice of the death penalty as all other civilised countries have."
Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder, who could have stopped the execution, was "not convinced" that Coleman was innocent, although he declined to say whether he thought Coleman was guilty. In an exceptionally bizarre move, the governor allowed the desperate Coleman to take a lie-detector test a few hours before his execution. Coleman failed.
Nobody was surprised by this. Such tests are based on blood pressure measurements. Who could have been in any doubt about the state of Coleman's blood pressure 12 hours before he was due to be electrocuted?
Afterwards the governor told the press: "If he had passed ... it could have affected what the ultimate result could have been". In other words, Coleman's life depended on the throw of loaded dice — a cruel trick on a man about to die for something he may not have done.
It was a US Supreme Court ruling that sealed Coleman's fate. His lawyers had inadvertently filed an important petition one day late, and the court banned all further appeals that might have saved him.
All this proved was that the hideous lottery of the US death penalty is even more cruel and grotesque than many people had supposed.
Others executed this year included Johnny Frank Garrett in Texas, who was 17 years old at the time of the crime for which he was sentenced to die. He
was also severely mentally impaired, chronically psychotic and brain-damaged. Garrett was the fifth juvenile offender executed in the US since 1985 — in clear violation of international standards which absolutely prohibit the use of the death penalty on those aged under 18 at the time of the crime.
More juvenile offenders are under sentence of death in the USA than in any other country in the world. Thirty-three are now on death rows in 13 US states.
The Supreme Court's rulings on death penalty issues are causing increasing consternation internationally as well as in the US. According to the court's rulings, it is constitutionally permissible to execute a 16-
year-old offender or a prisoner with the mental ability of a 10-year-old child.
In the decision which maintained that it was acceptable to kill 16- and 17-year-old offenders, the court told the world that international standards were irrelevant and that what really counted were "American conceptions of decency". Are American conceptions of decency so far behind well-established international human rights standards?
The US government's insistence on executing juveniles helped to undercut one of the world community's core human rights treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. AI has long urged the US to ratify this covenant. Regrettably, unlike most governments which ratify both this covenant and its twin covenant on economic, social and cultural rights simultaneously, the US administration made no move to give its support to economic, social and cultural rights.
And its long-awaited ratification of the covenant on civil and political rights was accompanied by a
whole package of limiting reservations, declarations and understandings. The USA could not bring itself to accept unreservedly all the provisions which the world community has agreed are necessary for the international protection of human rights.
Most crucially, the US government made a broad reservation to Article 6, the article which protects the right to life, because it prohibits the imposition of the death sentence on offenders under 18. This and other restrictions by the US government seriously undermine the rights guaranteed by this international covenant.
The attitude of the US government in its ratification of international human rights treaties has become that of ratifying only after making reservations that seek to ensure that no change in existing US practice is required. If all nations were to act in this spirit, the international framework of human rights protection would become meaningless. AI is urging those governments which have more fully accepted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to make strong objections to the reservations made by the US government.