Posted on 07/01/2002 12:46:12 PM PDT by ZULU
By Devlin Barrett Associated Press Writer Monday, July 1, 2002; 3:24 PM
NEW YORK –– The federal death penalty was declared unconstitutional Monday by a judge who said too many innocent people have been executed before they could be vindicated.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff is the first federal judge to declare the 1994 Death Penalty Act unconstitutional. Monday's ruling would not affect individual states' death penalty statutes.
The federal government was expected to appeal the ruling, which came in the case of two alleged drug dealers accused of killing an informant.
"In light of Judge Rakoff's decision, we are considering our appellate options," said Herb Hadad, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney James Comey.
Rakoff's 28-page ruling reaffirmed his earlier opinion that the law violated the due process rights of defendants. Prosecutors argued that the Supreme Court already has concluded that the Constitution's due process safeguards do not guarantee perfect or infallible outcomes.
Rakoff found that the best available evidence indicates that, "on the one hand, innocent people are sentenced to death with materially greater frequency than was previously supposed and that, on the other hand, convincing proof of their innocence often does not emerge until long after their convictions."
He based his findings on a number of studies of state death penalty cases. He said he used those studies because the number of federal death sentences – 31 – was too small to draw any conclusions.
Only two people, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and drug killer Juan Garza, have been executed under the federal law. Of the remaining 29, five were reversed. The government said none of the 31 defendants was later found to be innocent.
Prosecutors had argued that federal death row inmates had greater legal protections than state court defendants, but the judge found the opposite was true because the rules of evidence in federal court are more favorable to law enforcement.
"There is no good reason to believe the federal system will be any more successful at avoiding mistaken impositions of the death penalty than the error-prone state systems already exposed," Rakoff wrote.
The judge's ruling came during pretrial arguments in the case of Alan Quinones and Diego Rodriguez, alleged partners in a Bronx heroin ring. They are accused of torturing, and killing informant Edwin Santiago on June 27, 1999.
Rakoff had indicated in April that he was considering declaring the federal death penalty unconstitutional and had given prosecutors one last chance to persuade him otherwise before he ruled on a pretrial defense motion to find the statute unconstitutional.
Prosecutors urged the judge to resist ruling on the issue at all until after the scheduled Sept. 2 of Quinones and Rodriguez.
Apparently what those two lunatics had in San Francisco is contagious. It has spread to tNew York City (no surprise there.)
I am unaware of a single case that meets this criteria. Can the judge name an innocent man who was executed? Within living memory, please.
So, is he saying that the Federal System is the same as the flawed one in Illinois?
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