WASHINGTON A U.S. man convicted of murdering a store cashier as a teenager was executed Monday in Texas, prison officials said. Robert Anthony Carter, 34, who spent more than half of his life in prison, was sentenced to death in March 1982 for having killed a cashier during a hold-up in Houston eight months earlier. He was 17. It was the second time in a month that Texas has executed a man sentenced to death for a crime he committed while a minor.

He was executed 6:25 p.m. local time (2325 GMT) by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas, after eating a last meal of fish, french fries, orange juice and chocolate cake. I'm going to a better place, were his last words, according to a prison official, Larry Fitzgerald. Last week, Amnesty International wrote to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to ask him to intervene on Carter's behalf when he met U.S. President Bill Clinton in Germany. The human rights association stressed that the condemned man was physically ill and noted that putting to death young delinquents flies in the face of numerous international human rights conventions.

On April 22, Texas ignored calls for clemency from Pope John Paul II, among others, and executed Joseph Cannon, 38, for a murder committed when he was 17. A third man in the same situation, Napoleon Beazley, now 21, is due to be executed May 26 for the murder of an adolescent. (AFP)