Prosecutors and the Death Penalty (The Nation)

[marmar]

Prosecutors and the Death Penalty
Liliana Segura


As the scandal over the US Attorney purge intensifies, each day brings stark revelations. From intimidating phone calls made to prosecutors' homes to incriminating e-mails from the office of former White House counsel Harriet Miers, to the lurking shadow of Karl Rove, it's a political firestorm that threatens to reduce the career of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to ashes. But long before this controversy shed light on the political maneuvering between the White House and the Justice Department, two of the fired attorneys were engaged in a largely invisible internal struggle with the Justice Department over its aggressive pursuit of the death penalty.

Both Paul Charlton of Arizona and Margaret Chiara of Michigan have been criticized for failing to seek death sentences with sufficient gusto. Both US Attorneys were pressured to participate in an aggressive campaign begun by former Attorney General John Ashcroft and continued by Gonzales to extend the federal death penalty--particularly into jurisdictions without death-penalty statutes of their own.

The expansion of the federal death penalty is in many ways old news. Resurrected in 1988 and expanded by the 1994 Crime Bill, capital punishment was again encouraged by the Patriot Act. Shortly after taking office in 2001, Ashcroft amended a number of official US Attorney protocols for capital cases; among the most controversial was a new requirement that forced prosecutors to seek Attorney General approval in plea bargains that would spare a defendant's life. But it was only when Ashcroft began stepping into federal cases across the country, overriding federal prosecutors and forcing them to seek death sentences that people began to take notice.

In 2001 Charlton prosecuted Lezmond Mitchell for his role in a murder and kidnapping on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. Citing the Navajo tribe's opposition to capital punishment, Charlton opted not to seek the death penalty. But Ashcroft overruled Charlton, forcing a capital trial. The result: the only Native American on federal death row at the time.
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Besides Schumer, some of the most vocal Congressional critics of the US Attorney purge, including Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and Michigan Representative John Conyers, hail from states that have been affected by the Justice Department's aggressive pursuit of the death penalty, but neither lawmaker has addressed the death penalty issue to date. Meanwhile, the impact of the policy is already apparent. "In 2000, there was no one on the federal death row from a jurisdiction that did not have the death penalty," points out Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center. "Now there are six on the federal death row from such places." He adds, "The size of the federal death row has almost tripled from 2000 to the present, during a time when state death row numbers have declined." Indeed, the expansion of the federal death penalty is in direct opposition to declining death penalty trends throughout the country--yet another example of the Bush Administration's deliberate disconnect from its constituents.

With the White House and DOJ officials engaged in a showdown with Congress, the investigation phase of this scandal is just beginning. Thus far, D. Kyle Sampson, Gonzales's influential chief of staff (and a former adviser to Ashcroft) has been the only casualty. Regardless of the results, a hard look at the Bush Administration's death penalty push is long overdue. This needs to happen whether or not Gonzales survives. "In Texas we believe in having a fair trial," Republican Senator John Cornyn recently said, "and then we have the hanging." .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070409/segura

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

1. States Rights! States Rights! States Rights!