However one feels about capital punishment, one must admit that it is almost uniquely ours. The writer David Rieff recently observed that the death penalty is "one of those peculiar American institutions that make citizens of the other developed countries shake their heads with wonder." Indeed, it is so widely disowned that international tribunals seeking to bring the perpetrators of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda to justice cannot even consider it as an option. Henry LeClerc, president of the Human Rights League in Paris, has said, "For us, what the Americans are doing is completely incomprehensible, that such an advanced country can be involved in such an act of barbarism." The United States is the only nation in the world since 1997 known to have executed inmates who committed crimes while under the age of 18. Even Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen have apparently stopped doing this.
— Robert Jay Lifton, Greg Mitchell, Who Owns Death?