JUDGE: EXECUTIONS UNCONSTITUTIONAL

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.

On the Net:

Rakoff's opinion: http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/rulings/quinones.pdf