A federal judge in Vermont has become the second magistrate in two months to say the current national death penalty law is unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions ruled Sept. 24 in Vermont that the federal Death Penalty Act does too little to ensure that the rights of defendants in death penalty cases are safeguarded.
The judge struck down a law passed by Congress 1992, citing a series of recent Supreme Court decisions narrowing application of the death penalty. One delivered in June said only juries could sentence defendants to death.
Sessions said federal prosecutors should not have used a confession from an alleged accomplice to argue for the death penalty of 22-year-old Donald Fell, convicted of kidnapping and beating to death a 53-year-old Vermont woman in 2000. That is because the same evidence would not have been allowed at trial.
“It is inconceivable to this court that Congress could have intended … to provide less protection in a capital proceeding than in a non-capital proceeding,” Sessions wrote.
Sessions implied that Congress could fix the problem, however, by passing a better federal death-penalty law.
The Vermont case comes on the heels of a July ruling in New York by Judge Jed Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan.
Rakoff went further than Sessions in declaring that the death penalty itself is unconstitutional. The judge said the recent spate of high-profile cases of death-row inmates being exonerated by DNA evidence shows that the death penalty is applied unfairly. In many cases, Rakoff said, capital punishment amounts “to foreseeable, state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings.”
(ABP)
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