4.17 United States of America As of December 1999, legal provisions allowing for the use of the death penalty existed in 38 states as well as under federal and military law67. The scope of the death penalty legislation varies from state to state. In 15 states and at federal level capital punishment may not be imposed for crimes committed by individuals less than 18 years old. The remaining 23 non-abolitionist states have either no minimum age or a minimum less than 18 years, thus making the USA the only OSCE participating State retaining the death penalty for crimes committed by persons under 18. Twenty-six states do not forbid the execution of mentally retarded offenders. Sixty-eight persons were executed in 1998. In 1999, the number of executions reached 98, thus making it the year with the highest execution rate since the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976. As of 1 September 1999, 3,625 prisoners were on death row, including approximately 70 inmates who had been sentenced to death for crimes they committed before reaching the age of 18. Four offenders were executed during 1998 and 1999 for crimes committed before they reached age 18. Article 6(5) of the ICCPR explicitly prohibits the imposition of the death penalty for crimes committed by persons below 18 years of age. The United States ratified the ICCPR in 1992, but entered a reservation on this clause. However, the legitimacy of this reservation is widely questioned. The UN Human Rights Committee, for instance, deplored the practice of imposing the death penalty on persons who were younger than 18 years when committing the crime. It called upon the USA to withdraw the reservation to Article 6(5), and to take appropriate steps to ensure that persons are not sentenced to death for crimes committed before they were 1868. This view was shared by the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial and summary or arbitrary executions in a 1998 report on the use of the death penalty in the USA, which stated that the US practice of imposing the death penalty on those under 18 at the time of the crime was a "very serious and disturbing practice that inherently conflicts with the prevailing international concensus"69. Among those executed in 1998 and 1999 were seven foreign nationals who, in violation of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, had not Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD