The first person in 40 years to be executed in the US for crimes committed when just 16 years old was due to be put to death in Oklahoma this morning despite last-minute appeals.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, yesterday appealed to the US authorities to stop the execution of convicted murderer Sean Sellers. Sellers (29) was sentenced to death in 1986 for killing his mother, stepfather and a shop assistant when he was 16 years old.
He was due to die by lethal injection at 6.04 a.m. today, Irish time, at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board rejected his lawyers' request for a stay of execution on Monday.
The state governor, Mr Frank Keating, who had power to exercise clemency, said he would never do so. Sellers has exhausted all legal recourse and will have been executed today unless the pardons board reconsidered its decision.
The Irish section of Amnesty International held a vigil outside the US embassy in Dublin last night. "His death sentence violates international law banning the death penalty for crimes committed by persons under 18 years," an Amnesty statement said yesterday.
"The USA executed three child offenders in 1998 - the only such executions known in the world," said Irish section director Ms Mary Lawlor. "The execution of Sean Sellers would mean that the USA has put to death more child offenders since 1990 than the rest of the world combined."
She said that in 1992, three mental health professionals had diagnosed Sean Sellers as having a childhood brain injury and multiple personality disorder, a condition in which several personalities manifest themselves.
In her statement, Mrs Robinson said that if carried out, the sentence would "run counter to established international principles and the international community's expressed desire for the abolition of the death penalty".
In 1984 the UN adopted safeguards providing that offenders under 18 years of age when they committed a crime, or offenders who suffered from mental disorders at the time, should not be sentenced to death.
Yesterday, Mrs Robinson said the US was obliged to respect the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, even though it has not ratified the treaty it signed in 1995. The convention forbids capital punishment for persons below 18.
She acknowledged the seriousness of Sellers's crime, but said an end to capital punishment would help to enhance human dignity and the development of human rights.
"It is in this spirit that I appeal again to the authorities of the US and the state of Oklahoma to stop the execution of Mr Sellers. The killing of one or more individuals cannot be used to justify killing another".
Some 70 people are on death row in the US for crimes committed when they were 16 or 17, according to anti-death penalty organisations.