Ronald Chris Foster is still alive … for now. Amid rising dissent, on Jan. 6 Gov. Ronnie Musgrove temporarily stopped the execution of Foster, who was 17 when he attempted an unarmed robbery and caused the death of the store manager in a struggle over a store gun. As we go to press, this question still looms: Will the state of Mississippi execute a juvenile offender? A similar case from Oklahoma is being presented to the U.S. Supreme Court later this month, and Musgrove decided to wait for that outcome.
In a letter from the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Walter Schwimmer wrote to Musgrove: “The case of Ronald Foster is particularly distressing, since it is reported that he was a minor at the time of the crime.” Schwimmer goes on to say that the execution would “contravene international legal standards, including those drawn up by the Council of Europe.”
Even among death-penalty countries, the United States is one of the few in the world to execute juvenile offenders. The Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the American Convention on Human Rights, and the “United Nations Safeguards Guaranteeing Protection of the Rights of Those Facing the Death Penalty” all have provisions exempting this age group from the death penalty.
Since 1990, the U.S. has executed 18 child offenders, compared to 14 such executions reported in the rest of the world combined. The 14 occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Yemen and Pakistan have now abolished such use of the death penalty in law. In 2001, the Congo executed five child offenders. China, the world’s main executing state, abolished the death penalty against child offenders in 1997.
The execution of Ronald Chris Foster is morally questionable on many levels. At the age of 17, with a mental age of 13, a black boy kills a white man with the white man’s gun. With the only defense being 22 pages of testimony (in a 1,211-page trial transcript) by Foster’s mother and father, the jury convicts the child to death by lethal injection. In the words of Walter Schwimmer, Musgrove “in the name of human decency” should stop Ronald Foster’s execution altogether. If Pakistan can do it, so can we.
— J. Bingo Holman
