US attorney general overrules prosecution deals
Julian Borger in Washington Friday February 7, 2003 The Guardian
The United States attorney general, John Ashcroft, has overruled his own federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for 28 defendants, in a drive to spread capital punishment into states that have resisted it.
In one case Mr Ashcroft demanded that prosecutors renege on a deal they had made with a defendant in a murder trial to drop their demand for the death penalty in return for testimony against a Colombian drug ring.
The attorney general, arguably the most conservative member of a rightwing administration, has also declared he will seek a death sentence for Brian Regan, an intelligence analyst arrested in 2001 for trying to sell secrets to Iraq, Libya and China.
The decision makes Mr Regan the first espionage defendant to face execution since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg 50 years ago.
Mr Ashcroft has also played a leading role in arranging for the two defendants in the Washington sniper case, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, to face charges in Virginia, which has a high rate of executions, rather than in Maryland, where most of the sniper killings occurred but which had temporarily suspended the death penalty.
A national network of defence lawyers, the federal death penalty resource counsel project, has counted 28 cases in which Mr Ashcroft has stepped in to insist on the death penalty, against the judgment of the federal prosecutors involved.
His predecessor, Janet Reno, intervened in 26 cases over five years.
"There are more federal cases approved for the death penalty by the attorney general than there have ever been before," said Dick Burr, a Texas defence lawyer and a member of the project. "He's acting like a Texas politician, but then of course, he works for one.
The justice department did not return calls for comment, but a spokeswoman issued a statement saying the people involved in reviewing death penalty decisions in Washington "have the benefit of seeing the landscape of these cases nationwide, thereby ensuring consistency".
Almost half the cases in which Mr Ashcroft intervened were in New York and Connecticut, two states that have traditionally been reluctant to sanction executions.
Mr Ashcroft's actions come at a time when there are deep differences between states over capital punishment. Last month, the outgoing governor of Illinois, Jim Ryan, commuted the sentences of all the states' death row inmates.
Mr Burr suggested there was also a racial tinge to the attorney general's interventions.
He said: "In the cases he is seeking the death penalty overriding the prosecutors, 95% are cases involving people of colour, so it appears to be racist.
"He seems to side with prosecutors who recommend not to seek the death penalty against white defendants, but when prosecutors want to drop the death penalty against black or Latino defendants, he overrides them."
In one of the most controversial cases, Mr Ashcroft insisted on demanding the death sentence for Jairo Zapata, who was charged with involvement in two gangland killings in New York.
He had agreed to testify against other members of the Colombian gang in return for a signed agreement from prosecutors that they would not seek his execution.
Prosecutors have complained that the surprise decision will make it difficult in the future to secure the cooperation of defendants in organised crime cases.
Jim Walden, a former senior federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, said that it was "a remarkably bad decision" to impose a national death penalty policy against the judgment of local federal prosecutors, who were often seeking cooperating witnesses.
"It will likely result in fewer murders being solved because fewer defendants will choose to cooperate," he told the New York Times.