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U.S. court reverses ruling against death penalty
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NEW YORK (REUTERS) — A U.S. appeals court Tuesday overturned a trial-court ruling that the federal death penalty is unconstitutional, because it is tantamount to “state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings.”
The case marked the first time since the federal death-penalty act’s 1994 passage that a federal appeals court considered arguments that DNA testing shows innocent people are regularly sentenced to death.
In its ruling, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said such developments do not change the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that capital punishment is legal.
“The argument that innocent people may be executed … is not new; it has been central to the centuries-old debate over both the wisdom and the constitutionality of capital punishment,” the appeals court said.
The ruling by the three-member appeals panel reverses a decision by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff issued in July, the first by a federal trial judge to find the current federal death-penalty law unconstitutional. A Vermont federal trial judge found the federal penalty unconstitutional in September.
These court findings come amid growing national debate about executions, sparked partly by exonerations of death-row inmates because of DNA evidence.
In his ruling, Rakoff had cited research showing evidence of innocence often does not emerge for years after conviction.
He said execution deprived death-row inmates of a chance to exonerate themselves and created “undue risk” that innocents would be killed, violating due process.
This “compels the conclusion that execution under the Federal Death Penalty Act … is tantamount to foreseeable, state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings,” Rakoff said.
The appeals court said Rakoff and the defendants had not presented a new challenge to the constitutionality of capital punishment. The case before Rakoff involves Alan Quinones and Diego Rodriguez, who are set to go to trial in March in a drug-and-murder case. Prosecutors have said they would seek the death penalty if the men are convicted.
The Second Circuit also said that, before passing the 1994 death-penalty act, Congress was presented with extensive evidence that innocents might be executed.
Defense and civil-liberties lawyers involved in the case disagreed with the appeals court’s findings.
“We’ve always known there was some risk that innocent people would be executed,” said Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan Law School professor who argued on behalf of the defendants. “But in the past 10 years we learned something new … we’ve regularly sentenced innocent people to death. … That’s a change.”
Gross said the defense had not decided on its next step.
The federal death-penalty law applies to cases brought in federal court. It is separate from the laws in 38 states that have capital punishment. Compared with state executions, federal executions are relatively rare in the United States.
Only two men have been executed under the 1994 federal death-penalty law, both in 2001 — Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Juan Raul Garza, who was executed for murder and drug trafficking in Texas.
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