Tucson, Arizona Tuesday, 2 July 2002
http://www.azstarnet.com/star/today/20702nillegaldeathpenalt.html
THE NEW YORK TIMES
NEW YORK - A federal judge in Manhattan ruled on Monday that the current federal death penalty law is unconstitutional, citing the growing number of exonerations of death row inmates through DNA and other evidence.
The judge, Jed S. Rakoff of U.S. District Court, said the exonerations demonstrated that an "undue risk of executing innocent people" exists. He called that a violation of the constitutional right to due process, and said the death penalty was therefore "tantamount to foreseeable, state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings."
Rakoff's ruling is the first to find the federal death penalty law unconstitutional, lawyers say, and his reasoning, if the case were upheld, would seem to also apply to state death-penalty cases. For now, the ruling applies only to the case before him, which involves two men indicted on federal charges in a drug-related murder in the Bronx.
But the decision, which is based on novel conclusions that Rakoff first raised as questions in the case last fall, is likely to influence the continuing national debate about the death penalty. It comes at a time when the Supreme Court has been issuing rulings clarifying the use of capital punishment and in some cases limiting it, and critics are calling for moratoriums on executions.
A Justice Department spokeswoman, Barbara Comstock, was pointed in her criticism of Rakoff's ruling. "The determination of how to punish criminal activity within the limits of the Constitution is a matter entrusted to the democratically elected legislature, not to the federal judiciary," she said.
"Congress passed the Federal Death Penalty Act to save lives, and the Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly said the death penalty is constitutional," she said.
But Rakoff indicated in his 28-page ruling that new developments, such as "groundbreaking DNA testing," had rendered earlier thinking about the death penalty moot. It was not until after the enactment of the 1994 federal death penalty law, he said, "that the most clear and compelling evidence of innocent people being sentenced to death chiefly emerged."
"What DNA testing has proved, beyond cavil," the judge said, "is the remarkable degree of fallibility in the basic fact-finding processes on which we rely in criminal cases."
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