Oklahoma allows death penalty for child-sex criminals

Oklahoma became the fifth state to allow the death penalty for sex crimes against children on Friday, a day after South Carolina enacted a similar law.

The Oklahoma measure, signed into law by Gov. Brad Henry, a Democrat, makes people found guilty of rape and other sex crimes more than once against children younger than 14 eligible for the death penalty.

The South Carolina law also requires multiple offenses, but against children under 11.

Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group that opposes capital punishment, said the new laws would impose disproportionate punishment and were probably unconstitutional.

There has not been an execution for rape in the United States since 1964, and no one has been executed for any crime that did not involve a killing since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty could not be imposed for the rape of an adult woman. The penalty was, the court ruled, disproportionate to the crime and therefore forbidden as cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

At the time, Georgia was the lone state that permitted the death penalty for the rape of adult women, a fact that the Supreme Court found significant.

Trey Walker, chief executive assistant to Attorney General Henry McMaster of South Carolina, said Friday that "there will be more and more" laws making sex crimes against children capital offenses.

"There is not much doubt that this law would be upheld and found constitutional," Walker said.

The other states with such laws are Florida, Louisiana and Montana. In 2003, a Louisianan, Patrick O. Kennedy, was sentenced to death under a law enacted in 1995 that allows the death penalty for the rape of a child under 12. His case is working its way through the courts.

In 1996, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that the law was constitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in that case in 1997.