By ,
Published January 13, 2015
A man who was still legally a boy when, at the age of 17, he killed a laundry clerk during a 1990 robbery was executed by lethal injection on Tuesday in a Texas prison.
Glen McGinnis, 27, was the sixth person put to death this month in Texas, which leads the nation in capital punishment.
He died without making a statement in an execution that drew protests from the European Union, human rights group Amnesty International and the American Bar Association because McGinnis was a juvenile at the time of the killing.
McGinnis was sentenced to die for the Aug. 1, 1990, killing of Leta Ann Wilkerson in Conroe, Texas, near Houston. He shot her four times in the head and back while robbing the laundry where she worked, then fled in her car.
Death penalty opponents complained that McGinnis came from a troubled background from which the state of Texas should have protected him when he was young. His mother was a drug abuser and he was raped and beaten as a child.
"Texas failed to protect Glen from an extremely abusive home situation. It is failing him again by executing him for a crime he committed as a youth. Texas Gov. George W. Bush could exhibit some 'compassionate conservatism' by granting clemency," the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said in a statement.
Bush, the Republican presidential front-runner who was campaigning in New Hampshire on Tuesday, took no action in the case. He has commuted only one death sentence to life in prison since taking office in January 1995.
McGinnis was the 205th person executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982, following the lifting of a national ban by the U.S. Supreme Court.
https://www.foxnews.com/story/texas-executes-man-who-killed-at-17