[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----PENN., OHIO, USA

[Rick Halperin]

July 29




PENNSYLVANIA:

$80K cost of Northampton County death penalty case ignites debate on capital 
punishment’s expense



Northampton County’s latest death penalty trial cost taxpayers nearly $80,000 
at a time when executions have ceased in Pennsylvania.

While hefty, that price tag makes Dekota J. Baptiste’s the cheapest capital 
murder trial in recent years at the Easton courthouse, where defense bills 
alone in other such cases have routinely exceeded 6 figures.

In May, Baptiste was convicted of 1st-degree murder for a Palmer Township 
shooting in which he emptied his revolver into a car outside an auto parts 
store off Route 22. A jury deadlocked on whether the 28-year-old Easton man 
deserved to be sentenced to die, and he is serving life in prison without 
parole.

Death penalty cases are routinely the priciest, given what is at stake. Experts 
for the prosecution billed $25,226, which covered a psychiatrist, Dr. John 
O’Brien II, who testified at Baptiste’s sentencing ($20,226); and a forensic 
pathologist, Dr. Zhongxue Hua, who conducted the victim’s autopsy ($5,000).

Defense costs reached $50,280 and were also borne by taxpayers because Baptiste 
is indigent. They paid for two court-appointed lawyers, a psychologist, a 
private investigator, a ballistics analyst and mitigation specialist Cynthia 
Hallock, according to figures provided by the court administrator’s office.

Those numbers could rise even further. Hallock, who highlighted Baptiste’s 
hard-luck upbringing to jurors, is seeking court approval for an additional 
$4,659 on top of the $16,300 that Judge Samuel Murray already approved.

An accident reconstructionist who testified for the defense also has yet to 
submit his bill, the administrator’s office said.

Convicted killer Dekota Baptiste avoids death penalty after jury deadlocks

But the defense expenses represent a fraction of those incurred in previous 
high-profile capital trials, including the 2017 prosecution of Easton killer 
Jeffrey Knoble Jr., for which taxpayers footed more than $143,000, the highest 
in recent memory. Like Baptiste, Knoble was ultimately sentenced to life in 
prison.

Knoble’s costs sparked a billing dispute been the court and one of his experts, 
Louise Luck, a mitigation specialist who received $76,000 and submitted further 
invoices that the county refused to pay. Luck defended her bills, saying her 
work with Knoble was difficult and time-consuming, but court administrators and 
the county controller questioned whether they were excessive.

On Thursday, court Administrator Jermaine Greene said Baptiste’s lower figures 
come as the court has tried to tamp down costs. Bills are scrutinized and 
defense attorneys and their experts are held to court-ordered caps on their 
compensation unless they can justify it to the judge, Greene said.

“We want to make sure that they’re not getting a blank check, but they are 
providing the services that they are contracted to provide," Greene said.

The largest expense in Baptiste’s defense was for his lawyers, Brian Monahan 
and Tyree Blair, who received $22,500, the court-ordered ceiling on their pay. 
They were followed by Hallock, private investigator Barry Golazeski ($6,025), 
psychologist Frank Dattilio ($4,375) and ballistics expert Carl Leisinger III 
($1,080).

On Thursday, Monahan defended the expenses, noting that in seeking to put 
someone to death, the state has vastly superior resources, considering district 
attorneys’ offices and police departments are taxpayer funded.

“It’s clear that the prosecution resources are unlimited compared to the 
minimal court-appointed defense budgets that are paid for by the county,” 
Monahan said.

Lehigh, Northampton differ in putting a price on justice

On Feb. 23, 2017, Baptiste repeatedly shot 37-year-old Terrance R. Ferguson of 
Bangor after following him to the AutoZone on 25th Street in Palmer. 
Authorities said Baptiste was jealous over his ex-girlfriend, Thressa Duarte, a 
passenger of Ferguson’s who escaped injury by ducking to the floor as bullets 
sprayed over her.

In seeking a death sentence, prosecutors said that not only did Baptiste murder 
Ferguson, he put others in grave risk. In arguing for a life sentence, the 
defense said Baptiste lived a turbulent life in which he was surrounded by 
violence and poverty.

Capital punishment in Pennsylvania has long been embattled. A March analysis by 
The Morning Call of 4,184 murder convictions across the state from 2004 to 2017 
showed that prosecutors are increasingly reluctant to pursue it, given the high 
financial cost and the lengthy legal battles it guarantees.

There hasn’t been an execution in 2 decades, even before Gov. Tom Wolf imposed 
a moratorium on them in 2015. The courts have aggressively scrutinized death 
sentences, throwing out scores at appeal.

Marc Bookman, an anti-capital-punishment lawyer in Philadelphia, said it is 
impossible to have a viable death penalty without being willing to pay for an 
adequate defense.

“This is the problem with the death penalty writ large,” said Bookman, 
co-director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation. “We hate to 
spend this money so we do shortcuts, and when we do shortcuts, we make the 
product worse and then we have to do it all over again.”

Bookman said that even with Baptiste’s relatively low bills, the cost of his 
prosecution far exceeded what it would have been if prosecutors hadn’t sought 
death, given the heightened investigations that defense teams are required to 
perform in capital cases.

“The answer is, clearly, it probably would have been a quarter of that cost, 
maybe, or a third,” Bookman said.

That was disputed by Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli, a 
vocal supporter of capital punishment who said murder cases frequently carry 
high price tags regardless.

“A lot of these expenses, not all, would still be with us if it was not a death 
penalty case,” Morganelli said.

Morganelli has long been critical of defense expenses, casting them as often 
exorbitant and unnecessary. He said the court is trying to rein them in.

Morganelli defended the bills that prosecutors paid as money well spent.

“I can only speak for the DA’s office, that was a reasonable cost for that kind 
of case,” Morganelli said. "Our experts, they don’t gouge us.”

(source: Allentown Morning Call)








OHIO:

Trio of Franklin County death penalty cases set to start



Kristofer Garrett is accused of killing his 4-year-old daughter and her mother; 
Quentin L. Smith is charged with fatally shooting 2 Westerville police 
officers; and Anthony J. Pardon is charged in the rape, kidnapping and killing 
of a woman in her East Side apartment.

Dressed in a white button-down shirt, khaki pants and orange jail slip-on 
shoes, Kristofer Garrett watched attorneys question the jurors who could 
potentially sentence him to death.

Groups of 6 filed into Franklin County Commons Pleas Judge Chris Brown’s 
courtroom all day on a recent Monday for attorneys to gauge their opinions on 
the death penalty. Assistant Prosecutor Kara Keating asked jurors whether they 
thought they could sentence someone to death.

One man said he could never sign his name to a verdict form in a death-penalty 
case. Another said he saw no reason he couldn’t do that as long as the evidence 
was there. A woman asked whether sentencing someone to death would affect a 
convicted defendant’s ability to be an organ donor.

Garrett’s defense attorney, Mark Hunt, asked if anyone had ever served on a 
death-penalty jury before. No one raised a hand.

“It’s very unusual to be in this position,” Hunt said. “You are going to be 
deciding ... and there’s no easy way to say this, you are going to be asked to 
decide the ultimate fate of my client.”

All the while, Garrett — the 26-year-old suspect accused of murdering his 
4-year-old daughter, Kristina Duckson, and her mother, Nicole “Coley” Duckson, 
34, on a frigid January morning last year — just listened.

The next phase of jury selection for Garrett’s trial will begin Monday. His is 
the 1st of 3 capital-murder jury selections scheduled to begin in the county 
over the next 6 months.

The next will be Quentin L. Smith, 32, who is charged with fatally shooting 
Westerville police Officers Eric Joering and Anthony Morelli on Feb. 10, 2018, 
when they responded to a domestic disturbance. Jury selection for his trial is 
scheduled to begin Oct. 11.

Anthony J. Pardon, a 54-year-old convicted sex offender, could be sentenced to 
death if he is convicted in the aggravated murder, rape and kidnapping of 
Warren native Rachael Nicoletta Anderson, a 24-year-old aspiring funeral 
director, in her East Side apartment Jan. 29, 2018. An autopsy determined that 
she had been suffocated and stabbed.

Pardon’s trial was set to begin in August, but new evidence presented in the 
case has pushed his trial to January.

Ten death-penalty indictments have been filed in Franklin County since 2014. 
That’s significantly less than in 2004, when Franklin County indicted 34 people 
on death penalty charges, the highest in the state that year.

Garrett, Smith and Pardon were all indicted in 2018, the highest number of 
county death-penalty indictments in a single year in the past five years. 
Franklin County typically indicts 1 death penalty case a year. None has been 
filed in 2019.

County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien said the increase isn’t necessarily a swing back 
toward more death-penalty indictments. Rather, the indictments are the result 
of a careful evaluation of each case by his office, looking at the strength of 
the evidence, the facts of the case, and trying to determine the likelihood 
that a jury would carry out a death sentence, he said.

“I think it depends on what the facts are and how egregious the actions were,” 
O’Brien said.

Killing on-duty police officers and young children immediately come to mind in 
describing “egregious” crimes, O’Brien said.

Though it’s no harder to indict a death-penalty case than it used to be, 
O’Brien said it can be harder to persuade juries to sentence someone to death.

Support for the death penalty has been decreasing nationally over the past few 
decades. In 2018, 56% of people were in favor of a death sentence for convicted 
murders, compared with 79% in 1988, according to a 2018 Gallup poll.

Murder rates nationally and statewide have decreased since the 1990s, said 
Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a 
nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that researches the death penalty.

“Nationwide, homicide rates have dropped by about a third, and death sentencing 
rates have dropped by 85 percent,” Dunham said. “That reflects in part that 
there are fewer violent crimes, but it reflects even more a diminished public 
fear of crime and a growing public doubt about capital punishment.”

Dunham said the combination of those two factors has led prosecutors to pursue 
the death penalty less frequently and jurors to consider alternative sentences.

Jurors in Ohio can spare someone a death sentence and instead sentence them to 
life without parole. That was the case for Brian Golsby, convicted last year on 
nine charges for the February 2017 kidnapping, robbery, rape and murder of 
21-year-old Ohio State senior Reagan Tokes, where some jurors said mitigating 
factors in Golsby’s life swayed them away from a death sentence.

The goal, O’Brien said, is to seek jurors who fall in the middle — neither 
adamantly for or against the death penalty — and let them decide.

“It’s a weighing process and getting a jury to look at the facts of the case,” 
he said.

(source: Columbus Dispatch)








USA:

House member introduces bill to abolish federal death penalty



Just after the Department of Justice resumed capital punishment after 16 years, 
Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley said the death penalty has "no place in a just 
society."

In response, the Massachusetts congresswoman is introducing a bill that would 
reverse the action and abolish the death penalty altogether.

While short on details, the bill aims to "prohibit the imposition of the death 
penalty for any violation of Federal law, and for other purposes." It's the 
latest piece of legislation introduced by Pressley, a member of the so-called 
"squad" of progressive Democratic congresswomen, that directly counters the 
Trump administration.

"The same racist rhetoric coming from the occupant of the White House, who 
called for the execution of the #Exonerated5, is what led to this racist, vile 
policy," Pressley tweeted, remarking on Trump's past claims that the wrongly 
convicted "Central Park 5" should face the death penalty for their alleged 
crimes.

"It was wrong then and it's wrong now. The cruelty is the point - this is by 
design," she added.

Pressley tweeted out an image of the bill. It states, if enacted, "no person 
may be sentenced to death or put to death on or after the date of enactment of 
this act for any violation of federal law." It notes that those who were 
sentenced before the bill's enactment should be re-sentenced for their crimes.

On Thursday, Attorney General William Barr announced that his DOJ was bringing 
back capital punishment after more than 16 years without a single federal 
execution. Barr has now directed the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to adopt a 
change to the federal execution protocol to make it possible to execute inmates 
on death row.

In doing so, Barr directed the BOP's Acting Director Hugh Hurwitz to schedule 
executions for 5 convicted murderers, and the Justice Department says more 
executions will be scheduled soon.

The bill currently has support from the likes of Pressley's "squad" co-members 
Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among 11 other 
Democrats. It also has support from Rep. Justin Amash, formerly of the 
Republican party.

(source: 10tv.com)

**********************

Death Penalty Reminder: 160 people sentenced to death were later found to be 
not guilty



As far as I know, the last person to be strapped into the gas chamber at the 
Maryland Penitentiary was me. Years ago, I spent a week on death row, 
interviewing inmates assigned to die, and figured I’d top it off by getting a 
more intimate feel for their final moments.

2 things have stayed with me in the near-half century since: that final 
slamming of the gas chamber door, which seemed like the closing of a coffin. 
And the unanimous belief among the dozen death row inmates, in one 
claustrophobic cell after another, that each man would rather be executed at 
that very moment than live out his life endlessly waiting for an official death 
date.

They talked about days and nights all alone in their cells, about the sheer 
loneliness, about never knowing the embrace of another human being. From a 
couple of cells, they had a pretty good angle onto a busy street outside, where 
folks went about their lives. It added to their sense of isolation and torment 
and sheer rejection by the rest of the human race.

And yet, we think we’re punishing them best by merely killing them.

All of this came back to me the other day, when William Barr, the U.S. attorney 
general, announced that the federal government is bringing back the death 
penalty.

Critics have cited Barr’s immaculate sense of timing. 30 states still put 
people to death, but there’s been an unofficial federal moratorium on it since 
2003. But we’re heading into an election season, and President Donald Trump 
famously champions capital punishment.

Mainly, he’s famous for championing it for the wrong people.

Well, what the hell, mistakes happen, don’t they?

Among opponents of the death penalty are those who point out that 160 people 
sentenced to death since 1973 were later exonerated. Among them are the 
so-called Central Park 5, the 5 black and Latino men wrongly convicted, as 
teenagers, in the brutal rape of a jogger in New York.

Trump was a long way from his presidency back then, but he already had his big 
mouth. At the height of 1989’s hysteria over the five youngsters, he bought 
full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty.

Deploring “the dangerously permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of 
every age to beat and rape a helpless woman,” Trump attacked then-Mayor Edward 
Koch for saying “that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do 
not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murders.”

So do many of us. Except that Trump had the wrong muggers and murderers.

The 5 teenagers said police coerced them into confessing to a crime they didn’t 
commit. They were wrongfully convicted and sent to prison for gang-raping and 
nearly killing their victim.

But their convictions were vacated in 2002, and the city of New York paid $41 
million in 2014 to settle their civil rights lawsuit.

Last month, Trump was asked about those old newspapers ads. He’d never issued 
an apology to the 5 youngsters. Would he do it now?

His short answer was no. His longer answer echoed Charlottesville when the 
president somehow saw “good people” on both sides of the racist, anti-Semitic 
rally there.

Of the Central Park 5, Trump stood on the White House lawn June 18, and said, 
“You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt.” Thus, the 
president willfully chose to cut history short of its actual conclusion.

So now he’s got his Justice Department gearing up to put criminals – at least 
we hope they’re criminals – to death. The country has mixed feelings about 
this, according to polling. A 1996 poll said 80 % of us favored it. Now it’s 
reportedly about 50-50.

We can argue about it forever – and we already have. If someone I know was 
viciously attacked, my heart would want the assailant cremated on the spot on 
Good Morning America, for the whole country to see.

On the other hand, I remember those death row inmates years ago at the Maryland 
Penitentiary, each one saying execution would be better than the torture of 
endless years in their cells while the courts and the politicians figured 
things out.

Why give them what they’d prefer?

What’s questioned right now, though, is the timing of the latest announcement. 
It’s one more way to divide the country over an issue with long-established 
racial overtones, such as the black-white disparity in sentencing.

But there’s also the irony of Trump ready to revive an issue on which he looks 
like such a fool, calling for punishment of 5 innocent young men and now 
refusing, so many years later, to apologize for his callous blunder.

(source: Michael Olesker, Baltimore Post Examiner)

***********************

US resumes death penalty: morally unacceptable



Last week, the US government announced it will resume use of capital punishment 
after a 16-year hiatus and has set execution dates for five convicted 
murderers.

This is a response to President Donald Trump’s call for tougher penalties on 
violent crimes.

As a consequence, Attorney General Barr directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons 
to adopt a new lethal injection protocol to clear the way to carry out death 
sentences.

The Attorney General allowed the prison authorities to use the single drug 
Pentobarbital in place of a three-drug procedure previously used in federal 
executions.

The drug is a potent sedative that slows down the body, including the nervous 
system, to the point of death.

The execution is scheduled to apply to five convicted notorious criminals, who 
committed murder cases in various US States.

The executions have been scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020.

The US is one of the developed countries, purportedly claiming to be a human 
rights model, which applies the death penalty.

Historically, the death penalty was outlawed at state and federal level by a 
1972 Supreme Court decision that cancelled all existing death penalty statutes.

But in 1976, the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty to a number of 
states.

As a result, there was a clamour for legislation that would allow again the 
death penalty available at a federal level.

In 1994, the US Congress adopted the ‘Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994’, 
crystallising the earlier Supreme Court Decision reinstating the penalty.

Unlike other Western democracies, the US remains number one country that most 
famously positions itself as a role model of observing human rights, or human 
values, and the principles of democracy that hasn’t abolished the death 
penalty.

Paradoxically, the USA has the most critic human rights groups, most notably 
Human Rights Watch, but why not campaigning to abolish the death penalty in 
their homeland.

In fact, Human Rights Watch has been at the forefront of demonising many 
countries around the world of poor human rights record.

But, why not using the same aggressive style to the USA to outlaw the death 
penalty, the worst denial of the right to life?

For more than a decade ago, Rwanda, for example, outlawed the death penalty. 
Therefore, it now acts as a role model to the respect of human values.

In its several reports, Human Rights Watch criticized Rwanda of poor human 
rights record. This time round they can now change the narrative to commend 
Rwanda for the abolition of death penalty.

This is the worst form of punishment, which shocks human conscience, applicable 
in American legal system.

It’s true to say Americans have always been idealistic people. They set high 
standards for themselves, but they don’t hold firmly to ideals that they 
believe are true, important, and desirable. If they preach what they don’t 
truly believe in. Indeed, they don’t always live up to these ideals, or core 
values.

A question mark, once again, hangs over the Human Rights Watch. Why not 
galvanizing action into outlawing the death penalty? In any case, the campaign 
for respect of human rights needs to start from their home country?

It’s interesting to note that USA has consistently, by its spontaneously 
influential role, ensured that most countries outlaw death penalty.

It, equally, successfully influenced the adoption of all Statutes of 
International ad hoc tribunals, except the Nuremberg trials, not to incorporate 
the death penalty. Looking at various Statutes of international ad hoc criminal 
tribunals, the maximum sentence is life imprisonment.

Likewise, it’s important to articulate that the preceding Statutes were adopted 
in accordance with a UN-sponsored Second Optional Protocol to the International 
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death 
penalty is a side agreement to the International Covenant on Civil and 
Political Rights.

It was created on 15 December 1989 and entered into force on 11 July 1991.

However, majority of the countries, including the USA, have not yet ratified 
it, but nevertheless they abolished the death penalty.

By 2017, 142 countries had abolished the death penalty in law or practice, 
leaving 56 countries still using capital punishment. There were at least 993 
recorded executions in 23 countries, with more than 20,000 people on death row. 
Some 84% of all recorded executions in 2017 took place in 4 countries: Iran, 
Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan.

Surprisingly, there’s a strong resistance to abolishing the death penalty in 
Asia, the Arab World and the US. However, a good number of African countries 
have abolished capital punishment or operate moratoriums.

Unlike the US, all EU countries have abolished the death penalty in line with 
the European Convention on Human Rights.

(source: The New Times)

**************************

US government plans to use drug for execution that Europe banned exporting to 
them



The United States is set to resume using the death penalty after an almost 
2-decade moratorium on the practice.

The US Attorney General William Barr directed the federal bureau of prisons on 
Thursday to schedule the executions of 5 people convicted of murder and in some 
instances of torturing and raping children and the elderly.

It will also adopt a new execution protocol and carry out capital punishment 
with the injection of a single lethal drug called pentobarbital.

It is unclear where the US will get its supply of the drug because there is a 
shortage of the drug in the country. Euronews contacted the Department of 
Justice for comment but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Europe limits exports of lethal drugs

The US shortage has been in part attributed to European pharmaceutical company 
Lundbeck's 2011 decision to stop distributing the drug "to prisons in U.S. 
states currently carrying out the death penalty by lethal injection".

But, further to that, the European Union banned the export of drugs which could 
be used for "capital punishment, torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading 
treatment or punishment" in December 2011.

The EU is strongly opposed to the death penalty. Abolishing the death penalty 
is an "explicit and absolute condition" to become a member state.

In 2005, the EU banned trade in certain products that can only be used for 
capital punishment or torture.

"It was an ambitious regulation, but it was limited to prohibiting the 
manufacture of these products in the EU and their exportation," socialist MEP 
Inmaculada Rodríguez-Piñero told Euronews.

Among the drugs that the EU banned in 2011 was sodium thiopental, another drug 
commonly used in US lethal injections as part of a three-drug method of 
execution.

Hospira was the last American company to produce that drug but decided to stop 
producing it in 2011 amidst pressure from Italian authorities as the company's 
production plant was based there.

In 2015, The Associated Press reported that Arizona had illegally tried to 
import sodium thiopental but the consignment was stopped by federal officers at 
the state's main airport. A federal court had stopped executions in the same 
state after one man's execution lasted 2 hours.

States originally turned to pentobarbital after a shortage of sodium 
thiopental. Pentobarbital was used in euthanise animals and for 
physician-assisted suicides.

Several US media outlets have reported that some states turned to "compounding 
pharmacies" to make a version of pentobarbital after the EU export controls 
changed.

The EU strengthened the export ban in 2016 on any equipment that could 
"contribute to torture or execution".

Capital Punishment in the US

The Department of Justice defended the change in drug protocol, stating, "since 
2010, 14 states have used pentobarbital in over 200 executions".

Pentobarbital is set to replace the "3-drug procedure" that had been used 
previously to sedate a person, stop the body's muscles, and then stop the 
heart. The DOJ also said using the drug "does not violate" the eighth amendment 
to the United States Constitution which prohibits the federal government from 
imposing "unusual or cruel punishments."

The US government hasn't used capital punishment since 2003, but there are at 
least 60 prisoners on death row who are convicted of federal crimes. Capital 
punishment is currently legal in 29 U.S. states, according to the Death Penalty 
Information Centre (DPIC).

Barr said the proposed changes to the federal guidelines on execution would 
"[bring] justice to victims of the most horrible crimes" in a statement.

(source: euronews.com)

**********************

For Trump and Barr, Executions Are a Statement----A 16-year pause in federal 
executions taught the president and the attorney general nothing.



Late last week, Attorney General William Barr announced that the federal 
government, after a hiatus of more than a decade and a half, will start 
executing prisoners again in December. In the 16 years since the last federal 
execution, those sitting on the federal death row, even those who had exhausted 
their appeals, remained imprisoned in the unit for the condemned. Still, under 
both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the federal government sought, and 
sometimes got, new death sentences—even in states where lawmakers have rejected 
capital punishment.

Barr’s abrupt decision to resume federal executions looks like one more stunt 
to distract Americans from the misdeeds of his boss, President Donald Trump. 
But it’s also a statement about the persistence of the death penalty itself, 
despite everything wrong with it—its cost, its failure to deter crime, the long 
list of death-row inmates who turned out to be innocent.

I am a defense attorney in Chicago, and I specialize in capital cases. When I 
mention this to other Illinois residents, many express surprise that there are 
still death-penalty prosecutions in our state, which has led a nationwide 
retreat from capital punishment. First, we kept getting the wrong guy; since 
1977, a state that executed 12 people has exonerated 19 from death row. In 
1999, Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions, and in 2003 
emptied death row by commuting most sentences to life without parole. Finally, 
in 2011, our legislature abolished death as a punishment.

What many don’t realize, though, is that the death penalty is still available 
through the federal government. Murder and other violent offenses are usually 
prosecuted by states. The Justice Department’s own guidelines advise against 
prosecuting what is essentially “state crime,” as states themselves can do 
that. Yet as long as a U.S. attorney can find a federal “hook,” any state crime 
can be prosecuted by the federal government. If a defendant is a gang member 
accused of a murder, and the gang dealt drugs that at some point crossed state 
lines, that is sufficient to allow a federal prosecution.

Since Trump took office, those of us in the capital-defense community have seen 
a sharp spike in capital prosecutions of state crimes by the federal 
government, and there is a shortage of counsel qualified to represent 
defendants in death-penalty cases. States that are perfectly capable of 
prosecuting a gang-related murder are having jurisdiction taken from them by 
the federal government. Late last year, I was appointed to represent a young 
man facing the death penalty who had been in state court on similar charges. He 
was aware he was being transferred to federal court, but was shocked to learn, 
when I met him for the first time in lockup just before he was formally 
charged, that he was about to face capital charges. He wept. This was also news 
to his mother, who collapsed in my arms. She said, between sobs, that she 
thought we no longer had the death penalty in Illinois.

Under these circumstances, the persistence of capital punishment is 
particularly disturbing when study after study has found that it costs more to 
prosecute a death case than an imprisonment case, that the death penalty is not 
a deterrent to crime, that the federal government disproportionately seeks 
death against black and brown people, and that more mistakes are made in 
capital cases than in most others.

Proponents of the death penalty insist that capital cases benefit from extra 
safeguards. In fact, there are many reasons death cases are unusually subject 
to errors. The crimes are often horrifying, taxing a jury’s ability to presume 
innocence—which even in much lesser cases does not come naturally to most of 
us. For example, if there have been some break-ins in your neighborhood and you 
read that the police have arrested someone, you don’t say, Let’s wait and see 
if he’s guilty. You say, I’m glad they caught the guy.

A jury in a death-penalty case gets an extra push in the prosecution’s 
direction. Anyone who opposes the death penalty is not allowed to sit on the 
jury at all. The fact that, at the outset of a death-penalty case, the judge is 
asking potential jurors about punishment makes the trial seem like a mere 
technicality. Because the federal government, in proceeding against capital 
defendants, routinely charges them with some form of conspiracy associated with 
a gang or political group, prosecutors are free to introduce many acts and 
crimes by other people that the jury may consider against the person facing 
death. Much of this evidence comes from alleged co-conspirators who are getting 
reduced sentences for their testimony. Thus, in federal court, hearsay from a 
witness who has something to gain often forms the majority of the evidence 
against the person capitally charged. Add up all these factors, and the 
possibility of wrongful convictions and wrongful sentences is much worse in a 
federal death prosecution than anywhere else.

What does this have to do with Barr’s recent actions? Support for the death 
penalty requires no evidence that it is administered fairly. But it also is in 
perfect alignment with Trump’s predilections. He infamously called for, in a 
full-page ad, the execution of the Central Park 5, who were later exonerated by 
DNA evidence and the confession of the actual rapist. Despite this, he has 
never withdrawn his remarks or apologized in any way. That case says a lot 
about the death penalty more generally: When the people in power just want to 
make a statement, it doesn’t matter what the facts show.

(source: The Atlantic)