Man Executed for Killing at Age 17
A man was executed by injection in Huntsville, Texas, for fatally shooting a laundry clerk when he was 17. Glen Alan McGinnis was convicted of shooting 30-year-old Leta Ann Wilkerson in the head, shoulders and back while stealing $140. The Vatican, the European Union, the American Bar Assn. and a collection of anti-death penalty groups had pleaded for the life of McGinnis, 27, because he was a juvenile when he killed Wilkerson in 1990. McGinnis said in a recent interview that he didn’t want to use his difficult childhood as an excuse for his crime. McGinnis’ execution was the sixth this year in Texas. He was the eighth juvenile offender executed in Texas since capital punishment resumed in the 1970s.
After his father abandoned him, the young man lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a mother who traded sex for crack cocaine.
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