Atty. Gen. Janet Reno on Tuesday refused to recommend a moratorium on federal executions in the wake of a Justice Department study that found striking racial and geographic disparities in federal death penalty prosecutions.
Reno ordered a review of how the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices choose murder cases for prosecution under federal death penalty laws.
“At this point we are troubled by the figures. But we have not found the bias,” Reno said at a news conference.
Seeking to explain the disparities, Reno noted that crime is much more prevalent in minority neighborhoods subject to “social ills” and that many of the federal death penalty cases originated during the crack epidemic of the early and mid-1990s, which hit inner-city areas especially hard.
Deputy Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, the nation’s highest ranking black law-enforcement officer, added, “I can’t help but to be personally and professionally disturbed by the numbers I see today.”
But Reno and Holder said they saw no need for a moratorium such as the one imposed in Illinois in January by Gov. George Ryan, which reignited national debate on the death penalty.
Since 1995, 80 percent of the 682 defendants who faced capital charges were minorities. Federal prosecutors asked the Justice Department for approval to pursue the death penalty against 183 defendants, 74 percent of whom were minorities. African-American defendants accounted for 44 percent of the recommendations made by the largely autonomous prosecutors who are presidential appointees. Ultimately, 20 defendants were sentenced to death, of which 20 percent were white and 80 percent minorities.
Just nine of the nation’s U.S. attorney’s offices accounted for 43 percent of requests to seek the death penalty. Those offices were in Puerto Rico, the eastern district of Virginia, Maryland, the eastern and southern districts of New York, western Missouri, New Mexico, western Tennessee and northern Texas.
By contrast, 40 U.S. attorney’s offices have not sought to pursue a single death penalty case since capital punishment in federal cases was reinstated in 1988.
Although federal death penalty prosecutions must be approved by the attorney general through a race-blind review process, and prosecutions of whites were approved slightly more often than those of minorities by Reno, the prosecution decisions still largely reflected the prosecutors’ recommendations.
President Clinton said the data raised questions because “we’re supposed to have a uniform law of the land.” But he noted there had been “no suggestion, as far as I know, that any of the cases where the convictions occurred were wrongly decided.”
Questions about the role of race in the imposition of the death penalty have been an enduring source of controversy, with many civil rights leaders and members of the African-American community expressing suspicions that subtle influences or outright discrimination lead the justice system to place a lower value on the lives of black defendants and victims. Surveys consistently show much lower levels of support for the death penalty among blacks than within other racial groups.
In June, Clinton voiced concern at a White House news conference over “the disturbing racial composition” of the federal prison system’s Death Row.
Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), a critic of the death penalty, renewed an earlier call for a moratorium on federal executions after the Justice Department study was released Tuesday.
“All Americans agree that whether you die for committing a federal crime should not depend arbitrarily on the color of your skin or randomly on where you live,” Feingold said.
Reno drew a distinction between the racial and geographic disparities the Justice Department study found in prosecutions and the series of erroneous death penalty convictions that led Ryan to impose a moratorium on executions in Illinois.
Ryan’s decision, which came after an in-depth Tribune report found numerous flaws in Illinois’ death penalty system, helped focus new attention on the debate, particularly on inadequate representation for indigent defendants across the country and convictions based on questionable evidence.
Just one month after Illinois’ moratorium, Clinton ordered the Justice Department study that was released Tuesday.
But Reno said she has found no signs that federal prisoners have been wrongly sent to Death Row.
“I think a moratorium would go to cases where people were wrongfully charged because of a lack of evidence or their actual innocence,” she said.
Since a major expansion of the crimes eligible for the federal death penalty took effect in 1995, the department has established a screening process before prosecutors can seek capital punishment.
Each death penalty prosecution must be reviewed first by a Justice Department panel in Washington and personally approved by Reno. Prosecutors must submit for approval each case for which a death sentence is possible, along with a recommendation on whether to pursue capital punishment or a life sentence.
The choice to prosecute an offense as a federal rather than state crime involves a high degree of discretion because overlapping jurisdictions mean most such crimes also can be prosecuted by state authorities.
For example, the most common capital crime for which federal prosecutors seek permission to pursue the death penalty is a violation of a federal law against the use of a gun to commit a homicide related to a separate crime of violence or drug trafficking. Such crimes are far more frequently prosecuted through state courts.
In some states, a federal prosecution would mean death for an offender while a state prosecution would not.
Reno said she would seek an internal Justice Department review of how those decisions are made as well as commission an outside review through the National Institute of Justice.
She said the questions she would like answered include: “How do cases come into the system? Why does one district have a number of submissions and others have no submissions? What is the process?”
Because most crimes are prosecuted at the state level, federal prosecutions represent a relatively tiny portion of capital cases, accounting for fewer than 1 percent.
The federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988, with a law that imposed it primarily for homicides committed by drug kingpins. Clinton signed a major expansion of the federal death penalty in the mid-90s, and 59 federal offenses currently carry the death sentence.
There have been no federal executions since 1963 and the execution of convicted drug trafficker Juan Raul Garza, which was scheduled for Aug. 5, was postponed by Clinton until Dec. 12 so Garza could use new procedures to petition for clemency. His lawyers said that in his clemency petition they plan to raise the geographic and racial disparities cited in Tuesday’s report.
