History
of the death penaltyTrial was a sensation: Ethel Rosenberg, 35 and her husband, Julius, 34, are separated by a wire screen as they ride to separate jails in New York City on March 29, 1951. The two were convicted as traitors in the first atom spy trial and later were put to death.
AP file photo
History
of the death penalty
Questions plague federal law
Since first hanging in 1790, citizens of United States have debated capital punishment
By Trisha L. Foncannon
Tribune-Star
Although the first federal executions weren't the media-hyped phenomenon expected to unfold with the lethal injection of Timothy McVeigh, they weren't without their share of controversy.
Since the first federal execution in 1790 -- Thomas Bird was hanged for murder in Maine -- questions about racial discrepancies, moral justification and legal necessity have plagued the federal death penalty.
"It's largely political," said Richard C. Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. Most of those executed under the federal death penalty would have been executed under state laws, but politicians have passed federal statutes to "show whoever's in office is tough on crime," he said.
Rory Little, a former associate deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, said that although the McVeigh execution has brought new attention to the federal death penalty, the debates surrounding it are timeless.
"The federal death penalty has been part of the code since the second session of the first Congress," said Little, a professor at the University of California-Berkley.
Under common law, the penalty for any serious felony was death, he said. "There weren't a lot of prisons. The idea of keeping people around for the rest of their lives wasn't part of the culture," Little said.
Early death penalty statutes reflected a more religious and conservative American culture founded on strict Quaker principals, Little said.
Legislators passed laws that not only punished convicted criminals by taking their lives, but dictated demeaning rituals for their corpses.
A law passed in 1790 required the corpses of all federally executed inmates be dissected for scientific study because supporters of the law thought the dissection would serve as a deterrent to crime, Little said.
And although the death penalty was tested by a strong religious abolitionist movement in the 19th century and several states passed death penalty moratoriums, the federal death penalty remained basically unchanged until the middle of the 20th century, he said.
The Rosenberg Executions: Opening the Door for Change
The emotionally charged and hotly debated execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish couple electrocuted in June 1953 in New York for conspiracy to commit espionage, forever changed the federal death penalty, Little said.
Although espionage can still bring the death sentence, the Rosenbergs' case touched a nerve with the American public about doling out death sentences for crimes other than murder, Little said.
Protests were staged throughout the United States and Europe in the months between the Rosenbergs' trial and their executions. Their guilt was never clearly established in the public's mind, Little said.
The couple's two young sons marched outside the prison with signs reading "Don't Kill My Mommy and Daddy," and the Pope asked for mercy on the couple's behalf.
But despite the protests, the couple -- convicted as members of a spy ring that sold atomic weapon secrets to the Soviet Union -- were electrocuted just after 8 p.m. on June 19, 1953.
Julius Rosenberg went to his death pale and shaken, but quietly, according to Russel Aiuto, a former professor at Hiron College in Ohio. Ethel's execution followed.
Ethel Rosenberg was the first woman to be executed by the federal government since Mary Surratt was hanged for her role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
The first jolt of electricity, which lasted 57 seconds, wasn't enough to kill her, according to Doug Linder in his article The Rosenbergs' Trial: An Account. She was restrapped to the chair and given two more jolts before she was pronounced dead.
No federal inmates convicted of espionage have been executed since the Rosenbergs.
The Future of the Federal Death Penalty
Rumors that the Supreme Court would soon rule the death penalty unconstitutional halted federal executions following the 1963 hanging of Victor H. Feguer, convicted of kidnapping and murdering an Iowa doctor, Little said.
Ending years of debate, the Supreme Court officially ruled state executions unconstitutional in 1972, and federal executions, though not addressed specifically, also came to an end. The federal death sentence was sought in cases after 1972 but, because of the state moratorium, was never granted.
Opponents of the death penalty argued then -- as they do today -- that the death penalty is not applied equally and that minorities are more likely to face executions than whites.
The break from executions, however, did not last long. By 1976, most states had rewritten their death penalty statutes, narrowing the number of offenses for which a death sentence could be imposed.
The court had misjudged the popularity of capital punishment, Little said. And though legislation has been proposed in Congress by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., for the past three years to once again ban federal executions, Little doesn't think the federal death penalty is going away anytime soon.
Feingold's bill, which died in 1999, 2000 and this year called for the federal government and all states that impose the death penalty to suspend executions while a national, blue ribbon commission studied the system.
"The time for a moratorium is now," Feingold said in January. "Before executing even one more person, the federal government and the states must ensure that not a single innocent person will be executed, that we have eliminated discrimination in capital sentencing on the basis of race of either the victim or the defendant, and ensure that we provide for certain basic standards of competency of defense counsel."
Despite the protests, the first scheduled federal execution since Feguer was hanged 38 years ago is scheduled to take place on Monday at the never-used federal death chamber in Terre Haute.
Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and killed 168 people, will be the 341st inmate executed by the federal government.
He also will be the first federal prisoner to be executed by lethal injection. Hanging, electrocution and lethal gas have been used in past executions.
The death chamber, located on the west grounds of the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, was finished in 1995, and the first 20 condemned men moved onto death row in July 1999.
Since then, two other executions have been scheduled, but none has made it as far as that of McVeigh.
Juan Raul Garza, a marijuana trafficker convicted of killing one man and ordering the deaths of two others, was slated to die in Terre Haute last Aug. 5, but his execution twice has been postponed and is now set for June 19.
David Paul Hammer, sentenced to die for killing his cellmate at a federal prison in Pennsylvania, has had three dates to die -- most recently Feb. 21. But Hammer, who at one time had dropped all challenges to his execution, had it postponed after reinstating his appeals.
While McVeigh is not likely to get much public sympathy, questions such as fairness and discrimination will continue to shape the future debate on the death penalty and any changes that might result, Little said.
Should the federal death penalty be allowed in states where no death penalty statutes exist? How can racial discrepancies -- present throughout the entire history of the federal death penalty -- be resolved? Should non-murder convictions warrant the federal death sentence?
Little said these are all questions that must be solved in the near future to ensure that the sentence, which he favors, is handed out evenly.
Robert Meeropol, youngest son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and head of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a Massachusetts-based group that supports children whose lives have been shattered because of crimes allegedly committed by their parents, said that as long as people are being executed, the questions surrounding the federal death penalty will only mount.
"One of the greatest ironies of the modern political age is that so many of the same people who don't trust the government to set up a fair tax system or they don't even trust the government to put up a traffic light in their community because they think they'll make a mess of it, those same people want to give the government the power of life or death by having a death penalty," Meeropol said.
He agreed with Little that Timothy McVeigh's execution probably won't serve as a catalyst for change.
But controversial executions -- like that of his parents, whom he barely remembers -- will propel the nation's anti-death penalty movement which has been grown dramatically in the last 50 years, he said.
"When you give government that kind of power, they inevitably abuse it. My parents' case is just one of many examples," Meeropol said. "The strongest argument against capital punishment is that capital punishment requires perfection. There's no room for error. You execute a person and you can't take it back. Errors are inevitable and innocent people will be killed."
"They're not all Timothy McVeigh," he said. "That's what people fail to see."
Back to Archived Stories Index