Veterans make up about 10 percent of the nation's death row population, according to a new study.

"Veterans in the United States are again receiving the respect and gratitude they deserve for having risked their lives and served their country," wrote the authors of the study, "Battle Scars: Military Veterans and the Death Penalty," published Tuesday. "But some veterans with debilitating scars from their time in combat ... have been judged to be the "worst of the worst" criminals, deprived of mercy, sentenced to death, and executed."

The estimated 300 inmates on death row around the country make up a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who suffer from post traumatic stress or other mental or physical trauma.

Many of the death row inmates - or inmates who have since been executed - were suffering from mental trauma incurred during their military service, the report stated, noting the case of Andrew Brattan, a Vietnam-war combat veteran executed in January for killing a sheriff's deputy in Georgia during a traffic stop.

Brattan's lawyers had blamed his actions in part on his combat experience and subsequent post traumatic stress, which they said had "forever altered his personality and his life."

Officials in Georgia executed Brattan in January.

As many as 800,000 veterans of the Vietnam war suffered from post-traumatic stress.

About 175,000 veterans of Operation Desert Storm were affected by "Gulf War Illness" and about 300,000 veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts suffer from post traumatic stress, according to the report, published Tuesday by the Death Penalty Information Center.

"For those who have crossed an indefinable line and have been charged with capital murder, compassion and understanding seem to disappear," the report said.

"At a time in which the death penalty is being imposed less and less, it is disturbing that so many veterans who were mentally and emotionally scarred while serving their country are now facing execution," said Robert Dunham, the Center's executive director.

"It is our hope that a better understanding of the extreme and long-lasting effects of trauma and the resulting disabilities many veterans have experienced will lead to a larger conversation about imposing capital punishment on trauma survivors and other people with severe mental illnesses."

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