The Execution of juvenile offenders, and the mentally retarded is a sheer violation of our eighth amendment rights. Minors, and the mentally retarded lack the maturity, experience and self-control to understand the consequences of their actions. The Florida House of Representatives voted last week to exempt all juveniles from the death penalty. Those who said it was too good to be true were right. In a monumental double-cross, the House leadership pulled the bill from the floor Tuesday to keep it from passing. There have been 702 inmates executed nationwide since a Supreme Court-ordered moratorium ended in 1977. Of those, about 35 had showed evidence of mental retardation in tests, said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, a group critical of how capital punishment is administered. Clinton during his primaries campaign in New Hampshire in 1992 announced that he had to go back home to Arkansas to be there at the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a black inmate who was so retarded that he asked the staff on death row to put the dessert from his last meal aside so that he could have it after his execution. And Rector is only one of many mentally retarded who have been sentenced to death. One case proves that you can be so ill you do not understand your own rights as a citizen. Emile Duhamel, a severely mentally ill death row inmate, died in the beginning of July 1998 on Texas death row. Duhamel could not understand where he was or what it meant to be executed. Although almost all civilized nations agree that the execution of juveniles is completely out of the question a considerable number of American states are ready also to kill inmates who were children when they committed their crimes. Chauncey Jackson is one of the youngest offenders on death row in America. He was barely 16 when he was charged with shooting to death Ronald G. Bonney Jr. in No...
