October 7, 2002

Judge questions fairness of death penalty
___BURLINGTON, Vt. (ABP)--A federal judge in Vermont has become the second magistrate in two months to say the nation's death-penalty law is unconstitutional.
___U.S. District Judge William Sessions ruled Sept. 24 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 in 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 the death penalty is applied unfairly.

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