Federal judges in New York have gone so far as to call some death penalty cases a waste of time and money. Last week, Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Federal District Court in Brooklyn told prosecutors that their chances of obtaining a death sentence against a drug dealer charged with dismembering two rivals were “virtually nil” and issued an order in which he said he was waiting for the Justice Department to reconsider whether to pursue an execution.
There's also Judge Jed Rakoff's excellent 2002 opinion finding the death penalty unconstitutional, which later was overturned on appeal but is still well read:
[He]cited the growing number of exonerations of death row inmates and ruled that the death penalty was “tantamount to foreseeable, state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings.”
Recently, the Times reports, other judges are taking similar negative views of federal death cases:
Last March, Judge Frederic Block wrote an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times in which he questioned the “enormous costs and burdens to the judicial system” caused by the death penalty. In 2003, his colleague Judge John Gleeson wrote an article for The Virginia Law Review in which he called Mr. Ashcroft’s decision to force prosecutors to seek the death penalty against their own recommendations “a bad idea.”
Another Brooklyn jurist, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis, has by his own count twice asked the Justice Department to reconsider the death penalty in cases he has overseen.
Only three people have been executed after federal convictions in the U.S. since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, in 2001; Juan Raul Garza, a drug dealer who killed three other drug traffickers in Texas, in 2001; and Louis Jones Jr., who kidnapped, raped and killed a 19-year-old female soldier in Texas in 2003.
Hopefully, the federal death penalty will become a rarely used relic. If so, I doubt it will be because legislators take it off the books. Or because prosecutors decide not to use it.
Rather, it seems, it will be because juries learn of its disparate application and fallibility and come to the realization that life in prison without the possibility of parole is punishment enough; because judges become more comfortable in taking an active role in preventing the overburdening of the system; and because better trained defenders specializing in death-defense has become the norm.
More on Ashcroft's attempt to override his prosecutors here and here. On his failure in Puerto Rico here. On Vermont federal Judge William Sessions ruling the death penalty unconstitutional here. On a federal judge in Mass. who criticized Ashcroft for bringing death cases in states without a death penalty here.
