Ashcroft: We Need More Death

JB

Shortly after arriving at the Justice Department nearly four years ago, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft was faced with a new internal study that raised serious questions about the application of the federal death penalty.

A small number of federal districts, including pockets of Texas and Virginia, were accounting for the bulk of death cases. Experts decried the geographical disparities.

For Ashcroft, an ardent supporter of capital punishment, the solution was to seek the death penalty more often and more widely.

Since then, he has pushed federal prosecutors around the country — often over their objections — to be more aggressive in identifying prosecutions that could qualify as federal capital cases. Much of that effort has been in states that have banned or rarely impose capital punishment.

But Ashcroft's quiet campaign, which has been overshadowed by his prosecution of terrorism cases, has made few inroads.

With public support for the death penalty in decline, jurors have rebuffed calls for the death penalty in 23 of the 34 federal capital cases tried since 2001, according to the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, a court- funded group that assists defense lawyers in capital cases.

Whether one supports or opposes the ability of the state to sentence people to death, one should applaud rather than decry the fact that juries in this country seem less willing to impose it. That trend has been produced by the individual decisions of members of the local communities all over the United States, who are supposed to represent, however imperfectly, the conscience of their communities. Even if one grants, as one must, that prosecutors and existing legal precedents play a role in the decrease in jury sentences of death, the trend is clear.

Juries all over the country are telling the courts that death is a matter of last resort, to be used sparingly, and only in the most serious cases. In many places they do not want it to be used at all. This is not timidity. It is not lack of empathy for victims. It is not insufficient concern with justice. It is civilization. By comparison with these juries all around the country, who regard the taking of a criminal defendant's life with supreme seriousness, Attorney General Ashcroft seems a savage, bloodthirsty brute.

Why is such a man the nation's chief law enforcement officer?