John A. Bennett
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John A. Bennett (died 13 April 1961) was a Private First Class in the United States Army who was convicted of the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl. He was an inmate at the United States Disciplinary Barracks, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. After President John F. Kennedy personally reviewed and approved the sentence of death imposed by the court-martial, Bennett was hanged on 13 April 1961, the last person to be executed by the U.S. Military as of 2006.
Bennett was black and born epileptic. Heavily intoxicated, he left his army base one evening in December 1955 to find a brothel, but stumbled upon a young Austrian girl. He raped her, and then attempted to drown her in a nearby stream. Convicted just one month later, both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy approved his death sentence (no execution of American military personnel can go forward without the review and explicit approval of the president). The unidentified girl along with her mother and father wrote to Kennedy, asking that Bennett's life be spared. (Serrano, 1994)
[edit] References
- R. Serrano, "Last Soldier to Die at Leavenworth Hanged in an April Storm," Los Angeles Times, 7/12/94. Bottom of page here.
- List of U.S. Military Executions from the Death Penalty information Center
- List of Executions in Kansas from Before the Needles
