Justice Report on Death Penalty Shows Bias

Sept. 12, 2000 -- Racial and geographic disparities abound in the federal death penalty system, according to a Justice Department study released today.

It is the first such review since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988.

Of the 682 potential death penalty cases U.S. attorneys forwarded to Justice for review between 1995 and July of this year, 20 percent of the defendants were white and 80 percent were minorities. U.S. attorneys recommended the death penalty be sought for 183 of them, 26 percent of them whites and 74 percent minorities.

“The survey today finds that minorities are over-represented in thefederal death penalty system, as both victims and defendants, relativeto the general population. Sadly, the same is true of the entirecriminal justice system, both state and federal,” Attorney General Janet Reno said today. “This should be ofconcern to us all.”

The report shows, however, that Justice recommendations for federal death sentences roughly reflected the racial percentages of the pool of defendants chargedwith capital crimes.

Holder: Report ‘Disturbing’

The study’s findings also reveal a geographic disparity in the administration of the federal death penalty. Even though prosecutors are required to submit all possible death penalty cases to Justice, regardless of their recommendations, some U.S. attorneys have submitted none, and others submit in wildly disproportionate numbers.

In 1995, Attorney General Janet Reno began requiring U.S. attorneysto submit for review all cases in which a defendant is charged with acapital offense and no plea agreement is reached. Her goal was to achievea more uniform system.

Reno asked Justice officials, under the direction of Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, to conduct a review to determine if the system is fair. The disparities the team found, displayed in the report’s more than 400 pages of mainly charts and tables, will likely fuel the debate over the federal execution system.

“No one reading this report canhelp but be disturbed, troubled by this disparity,” Holder said today.

Calls for a Moratorium

Today, a White House spokesman called the findings “troubling.” “We’ve seen the numbers,” White House deputy press secretaryJake Siewert said. “At first glance, those numbers are troubling.We need to know more about exactly what’s behind the numbers.”

In May, the American Bar Association sent a letter to the president asking him to impose a moratorium on federal executions pending a review of the system.

Earlier this year, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., asked President Clinton and Reno to stop federal executions and introduced legislation calling for a national moratorium.

The calls for a moratorium got a boost in January when the pro-death penalty and Republican governor of Illinois declared executions halted in his state pending an investigation. Thirteen inmates had been released from death row there since 1977, one more than had been put to death.

For his part, President Clinton called the report “astonishing,” and said he would wait for Reno’s comments and recommendations before making a decision on the moratorium requests. He also pointed out that none of the cases studied by Justice involved wrongful convictions.

The federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988 when Congress authorized the death penalty for so-called drug kingpins found guilty of murder. In 1994, Congress increased the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty by 60. Now, eligible federal crimes include murder of certain government officials, kidnapping resulting in death, murder for hire, fatal drive-by shootings, sexual abuse crimes resulting in death, car jacking resulting in death, and the running of a large-scale drug enterprise.

The federal death penalty has not been carried out in 37 years, but an execution is slated for Dec. 12. Juan Raul Garza, convicted in 1993 for three drug-related murders, was scheduled to die Aug. 5, but received a reprieve from Clinton so Garza could take advantage of new Justice Department clemency rules for capital cases.

Explaining the Disparities

Reno approved seeking death penalties for 159 defendants since 1995, of which 28 percent were for whites and 72 percent for minorities. Ultimately during this period, 20 defendants have been sentencedto death, of which 20 percent were white and 80 percent minorities.

Geographically, only five of the 94 U.S. attorney districtsaccounted for about 40 percent of the 682 death penalty casessubmitted for review. They were Puerto Rico, the eastern districtof Virginia, Maryland and the eastern and southern districts of NewYork.

Those five and four other districts, western Missouri, NewMexico, western Tennessee and northern Texas, accounted for 43percent of the 183 defendants that U.S. attorneys recommended forthe death penalty.

For Justice, the challenge now is explaining the bias. Some Justice officials have said some prosecutors are not charging defendants with capital crimes, pleading them out, or allowing state prosecutors to bring charges. Once the cases come to Justice, officials say, they are dealt with non-discriminatorily.

Disproportionate numbers of minorities in the criminal justice system will likely persist as long as conditions such as poverty, drug abuse and lack of opportunity disproportionately affect minorities, Reno said today.

“That is the reason I have focused on prevention efforts to giveall our children positive future and fought to secure equalopportunity for all,” she said.

While prevention efforts could help, she added, the federal criminal justice system is not designed to remedy these systemic problems by itself.

“We must ensure, however, that alldefendants who come into our system are treated in a fair and justmanner,” Reno said. “We must do all that we can in the federal government to root out bias at every step.”

Further Research On the Way

Reno has asked the National Institute of Justice to solicit proposals from experts, to study the reasons why homicide cases are directed to state or federal systems, and charged either as capital or non-capital cases, as well as the factors accounting for the present geographicpattern of submissions by the U.S. attorneys.

She also asked the U. S. attorneys to submit in the next 60 days data about capital-eligiblecases in their offices that did not have to be submitted for review under her 1995 rules.

Also, Holder will lead an effort to examine the factors used to decide which homicide cases are taken intothe federal system, when there is joint state and federaljurisdiction, and to identify the ways to improve how such decisionsare made across the country, Reno said.

ABCNEWS’s Beverley Lumpkin at the Justice Department, ABCNEWS.com’s Geraldine Sealey and The Associated Press contributed to this report.