JACKSON - Five Mississippi death row inmates have been saved from lethal injection following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that it is unconstitutional to execute those who committed capital offenses when they were under 18.
The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision throws out the death sentences of 72 juvenile murderers in 19 states. A dozen of the states, including Mississippi, have juvenile offenders currently on death row.
"They will be coming off death row and at most they will be sentenced to life in prison without parole," Andre DeGruy, director of Mississippi's Office of Capital Defense Council, said Tuesday.
The five are: Stephen Virgil McGilbery, age 16 when a jury found he used a baseball bat to kill four family members; Kelvin Dycus, 17 when he robbed and murdered a 76-year-old woman; Roderick Eskridge, 17 when he was charged with robbery and murder for killing a woman; Ronald Chris Foster, 17 when he killed convenience store worker George Shelton; and William Joseph Holly, also 17 when police say he robbed and murdered a Grenada cab driver.
DeGruy said the most likely scenario is for the inmate's lawyers or the attorney general's office to file a motion to commute the sentences of the juvenile offenders.
Attorney General Jim Hood said the ruling was not unexpected. "Our office believes that many people under the age of 18 present just as serious a threat as those over 18," Hood said. "However, the court has ruled and five death row inmates will be sentenced to life without parole and probably suffer a fate worse than death."
The Mississippi Supreme Court last year upheld the death sentence of Dycus, DeGruy said. He said that case was scheduled to be heard before the U.S. Supreme Court at the time of Tuesday's decision.
Dycus' attorney, Robert McDuff of Jackson, said the U.S. Supreme Court will send the Dycus case back to the state Supreme Court, which will then have to set aside his death sentence.
McDuff said the United States is one of the few countries in the world that had continued to execute people for crimes they committed as teenagers. "Our society punishes teenagers for severe crimes but the practice of executing them is far too extreme," McDuff said Tuesday. "I'm just glad the Supreme Court has put an end to it."
Debra Sabah-Press, a San Francisco lawyer who joined McDuff on Dycus' appeals, said the "decision recognizes a wealth of biological and psychological evidence that children neither function nor make decisions as adults."
Leonard Vincent, general counsel for the Mississippi Department of Corrections, said the agency will do nothing about moving the inmates off death row until a court order.
"What we'll do is wait until the court resentences them," Vincent said. "We'll then do whatever the court orders. After they are resentenced they probably will be moved to a different part of the building where they are now, be reclassified, and then moved to less restrictive housing."
The nation's highest court ruled that executing juvenile murderers violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The ruling continued the court's practice of narrowing the scope of the death penalty, which justices reinstated in 1976. Executions for those 15 and younger when they committed their crimes were outlawed in 1988. Three years ago justices banned death sentences for the mentally retarded.
The last time Mississippi executed a juvenile offender was in 1950, according to the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project.
The other states that allowed executions for people under age 18 are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Texas and Virginia.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
