About John A. Bennett
John Arthur Bennett (April 10, 1936 – April 13, 1961) was a U.S. Army soldier who remains the last person to be executed after a court-martial by the United States Armed Forces. The 18-year-old private was convicted of the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl in Austria. Despite last minute appeals for clemency and pleas to President John F. Kennedy by the victim and her family to spare his life, Kennedy refused. Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1961. Bennett is the only American soldier to ever be executed for rape in peacetime. == Early life == Bennett was the fourth of eight children born to a family of sharecroppers in Chatham, Virginia. His schooling finished in the fourth grade. Despite being epileptic, he managed to enlist in the U.S. Army when he was 18. According to a medical review after his arrest, Bennett had an IQ of 67, indicating that he was mildly intellectually disabled. == Military career == Although he dropped out of the Ordnance Corps for academic deficiency, he became an ammunition handler and a truck driver with the U.S. Army's 11th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion (11th AAA Battalion) at Camp Roeder near Salzburg in Austria.
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