Ashcroft and his Arbitrary, Unequal Administration of the Death Penalty

 Shortly after arriving at the Justice Department nearly four years ago, Attorney General 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 great bulk of death cases. Experts decried the geographical disparities in treatment. 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.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington organization that keeps statistics on such cases, of the 32 inmates on federal death row as of July 1, 19 were tried and sentenced in just four states -- Texas, Virginia, Missouri and Georgia. [more ]