Mississippi Plan to Execute Juvenile Fuels Legal Debate

Mississippi is due this week to execute a man convicted of murdering a shop assistant at the age of 17, while the supreme court contemplates whether the US should remain almost the last country to execute juvenile offenders.

Ronald Foster shot George Shelton, the cashier in a convenience store, during a botched robbery in 1989, and his case has become one of the key battlegrounds in the struggle to end juvenile executions in the US. He is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Wednesday.

Iran is the only other state to persist in imposing the death penalty on convicts who carry out their crimes under the age of 18. Twenty-two US states still allow juvenile executions although only seven have carried them out in recent decades.

The US supreme court voted last year to end the executions of low-IQ convicts but decided by a 5-to-4 margin not to consider the issue of juvenile executions. Another case involving a juvenile on death row in Oklahoma, has been forwarded to the court for consideration, and the nine judges have yet to decide whether to hear it.

Foster's lawyer, Silas McCharen, is calling for a stay of execution pending that decision, and met the Mississippi governor, Ronnie Musgrove, on Friday to discuss the case. Mississippi has not executed a juvenile since the death penalty was reintroduced after a moratorium in the mid 1970s.

Marvin White, an assistant attorney general in Mississippi, said the Oklahoma case was no reason to hold up Foster's execution. "I'm sure that question is going to be raised by many people over the next year, but precedent was established by the supreme court in 1989 and was reaffirmed just at the beginning of this term."

"So until they take the case up again and change the precedent, that is the precedent of the United States and the law."

Mr McCharen has questioned the quality of the defence offered at Foster's original trial, at which his lawyers failed to mention his history of abuse as a child, or his record of childhood alcoholism. They simply said he was drunk at the time of the killing. Foster was entitled to a special hearing on his age, his lack of previous offences and other factors which might have diverted his trial to a juvenile court. His lawyer, however, was unaware of that right.

Stephen Harper, the coordinator of the Juvenile Death Penalty Initiative, said: "When you have at least four justices who have already voted to consider whether to execute juveniles is unconstitutional, and after the court voted to rule the execution of the mentally retarded unconstitutional you would think there would be an abundance of caution. What's the hurry?"

The defence also points out that medical research since Foster's trial had shown that the brains of adolescents continued to develop after the age of 20. "The idea of reduced culpability is not just a moral issue, it's now a scientific one," Mr Harper said.

He added that the US refusal to abide by a worldwide ban on the execution of juveniles and its refusal (along with Somalia) to sign the international convention on the rights of the child would ultimately undermine Washington's global influence.

"It's fascinating to me that it's appealing to international law and international norms in dealing with terrorism, economic issues and human rights, and yet it has not decided to come into the international fold on this issue," Mr Harper said.