Another death penalty case the Supreme Court decided this week that is not getting much attention is the Bass case out of Detroit. The Court not only refused to find the feds are racially discriminatory when seeking the death penalty, they reversed the Sixth Circuit's decision that documentation showing how the feds decide to seek the death penalty must be disclosed to the defense to prove such a claim. Text of Opinion

The Supreme Court bought into Solicitor General Ted Olson's argment that the Sixth Circuit ruling "threatens to stop federal death penalty prosecutions in their tracks." Lawyers for Bass dismissed Olson's claims about the potential disruption of all federal capital cases as "melodramatic hyperbole" and "doomsday warnings."

The Supreme Court ruling acknowledges a federal study in 2000 that found that of 882 capital defendants, 20 percent were white, 48 percent were black, and 29 percent were Latino. The Sixth Circuit found that statistics from the same study demonstrated that ì[t]he United States charges blacks with a death eligible offense more than twice as often as it charges whitesî and that the United States enters into plea bargains more frequently with whites than it does with blacks. (citing U. S. Dept. of Justice, The Federal Death Penalty System: A Statistical Survey (1988ñ2000), p. 2 (Sept. 12, 2000)).

The study concluded that the reason for the higher minority percentage of capital defendants is not bias--it is because they make up a larger percentage of the pool of federal defendants.

25 inmates are now on federal death row awaiting execution. The Supreme Court says each must make a ìcredible showingî that ìsimilarly situated individuals of a different race were not prosecutedî in order to survive a racial challenge to the application of the death penalty in his or her case.

How exactly are they supposed to do that if the Govenment won't turn over the data from which they either can substantiate their claim or realize its unfounded?

Talk about a Catch-22...