AMNESTY REPORT SLAMS U.S. PRISONS

Rights group pushes for end to juvenile death penalty

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The human rights group Amnesty International has
launched a one-year campaign for penal reform in the United States, which
has more prisoners known to be awaiting execution than any other country.

The group called on U.S. authorities to abolish the death penalty for
juveniles, ban restraint devices such as stun belts, stop jailing asylum
seekers and set up independent bodies to investigate allegations of police
brutality.

In Rights for All, a 153 page report released for the campaign launch
yesterday, Amnesty said it saw a "persistent and widespread pattern of human
rights violations."

"Across the country thousands of people are subjected to sustained and
deliberate brutality at the hands of police officers. Cruel, degrading and
sometimes life-threatening methods of restraint continue to be a feature of
the U.S. criminal justice system," it added.

"In U.S. prisons and jails, inmates are physically and sexually abused by
other inmates and by guards ... Sanctions against those responsible for
these abuses are rare," it said.

A state department official said the United States welcomed scrutiny by
Amnesty but believed its political and judicial systems were "the envy of
the world."

The report said prison guards restrain the inmates with electric shock stun
guns, leg irons, pepper spray and restraint chairs. Some women prisoners
have given birth in shackles.

Amnesty International said it calculated that U.S. prisons for adults also
hold at least 3,500 child convicts in violation of an international
convention on civil rights.

People convicted for crimes committed as children can even face the death
penalty, putting the United States in the same category as Iran, Nigeria,
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

U.S. states have executed more than 460 prisoners since the Supreme Court
reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Unlike in most industrialized
countries, the trend is toward more and more executions. About 3,300 people
wait on death row.

Some of those executed have been mentally disabled. Blacks who kill or rape
whites are far more likely to face execution than if the criminals are white
or their victims black, the report said.

"The death penalty is often enacted in vengeance, applied in an arbitrary
manner, subject to bias because of the defendant's race or economic status,
or driven by the political ambitions of those who impose it," the report
said.

A similar pattern emerges for America's 1.7 million prisoners, over 60 per
cent of whom are from racial or ethnic minorities. Half of them are African
Americans, who make up 12 per cent of the population.

Checked-by: Rolf Ernst