U.S. District Judge William Sessions declared the federal death penalty in violation of the Constitution Sept. 24, the second such ruling in the past three months.
This ruling came just two months after a judge in New York made a similar decision. The New York ruling came in July, when U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff was the first to declare the 1994 Death Penalty Act unconstitutional.
To back up his ruling, Judge Rakoff cited evidence indicating innocent people have been put to death.
The second ruling, by Judge Sessions, came in the case of Donald Fell, 22, who is charged with kidnapping and killing a woman in a November 2000 carjacking.
For Sessions, capital punishment itself is not necessarily unconstitutional, but he wrote that “If the death penalty is to be part of our system of justice, due process of law and fair trial guarantees of the Sixth Amendment require that standards and safeguards governing the kinds of evidence juries may consider must be rigorous and constitutional rights and liberties scrupulously protected.”
Sessions also noted, “To relax those standards invites abuse and significantly undermines the reliability of decisions to impose the death penalty.”
These rulings show a departure from previous decisions, and may suggest a move toward doing away with the death penalty altogether.
According to University of Wisconsin-Madison clinical associate law professor James Cooley, the decision, “in the big picture, is part of a gathering weight on the judicial system to recognize that there are big problems with the death penalty.”
“This issue has been coming to the forefront over the past two years.” Cooley added.
Although the rulings will not affect individual states’ death-penalty statues, the rulings will serve as an outline for future decisions.
“The ruling has no binding authority outside of the district it was decided in,” said Keith Findley, a clinical associate law professor at UW. “However, the decision can have what is called persuasive authority. Other courts can look to it as an example. They can use it as guidance, but they have no obligations to follow it. In fact, they could disagree with it completely.”
While decisions in Virginia and Pennsylvania have upheld the Federal Death Penalty Act, Maryland and Illinois have been moving in a direction similar to that of the Sept. 24 ruling, by placing moratoriums on executions in their states.
Cooley cited one reason for Illinois moratoriums.
“Recently, there have been a lot of people exonerated in Illinois because they are finding evidence, mostly DNA, that shows these individuals were incapable of committing the crimes they have been convicted of,” Cooley said. “And in all of these cases, those that were convicted would have faced the death penalty.”
By enacting these suspensions, Illinois is able to avoid the main fallacy that Judge Rakoff cited as causing the death penalty to be unconstitutional — putting innocent people to death.
While the direct effects of the Vermont decision are limited, an article in the International Herald Tribune said the ruling “was likely to provide new ammunition for challenging death-penalty cases across the country.”
