WASHINGTON — President Bush on Monday approved the execution of an Army private, the first time in over a half-century that a president has affirmed a death sentence for a member of the U.S. military.
With his signature from the Oval Office, Bush said yes to the military’s request to execute Ronald A. Gray. He had been convicted in a spree of four murders and eight rapes in the Fayetteville, N.C., area over eight months in the late 1980s while stationed at Fort Bragg.
Unlike in the civilian courts, a member of the U.S. armed forces cannot be executed until the president approves the death sentence.
Gray has been on death row at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., since April 1988.
Members of the U.S. military have been executed throughout history, but just 10 have been executed by presidential approval since 1951 when the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military’s modern-day legal system, was enacted.
Dwight Eisenhower was the last president to approve a military execution — that of John Bennett, an Army private convicted of raping and attempting to kill an 11-year-old Austrian girl. He was hanged in 1961.
It was unclear where Gray would be executed. Military executions are handled by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Further litigation is expected, and these types of appeals often take years.
