TITLE: U.S. Federal Executions Are Rare but Expected to Increase

AUTHOR: Carey Goldberg

PUB: New York Times

DATE: May 7, 2001

For his last meal, Victor Feguer asked for an olive, just one olive, pit and all. He expressed hope that others would escape his fate, said priests who spent some of his last hours with him. Then, chewing gum rapidly, he mounted a scaffold in the auto body shop of an Iowa prison. His thick glasses were removed, a hood was put over his head and he was hanged. "The sheriff pulled the lever and down dropped Victor," recalled John Ely Jr., now 82 and a former Iowa state senator, who witnessed the 1963 execution. "The rope snapped and, as he hung in the air, suddenly, he took a deep breath. I dug my elbow into The Associated Press man next to me and said, 'Look, George, human life fighting to preserve itself.'" Only later did Mr. Ely learn that the sharp intake of air had been an involuntary reflex. The execution of Timothy McVeigh, scheduled for June 16 in Terre Haute, Indiana, is to be carried out by lethal injection and no such macabre moments are expected. While Mr. Feguer, whose lawyers described as mentally ill, had kidnapped and killed one person, a doctor; Mr. McVeigh's truck bomb killed 168 people in Oklahoma City. But the two soon will share membership in a relatively small group of convicted killers, spies and kidnappers who were executed by the federal government rather than by a state. Such federal executions are comparatively rare. There have been only 34 since 1927 and Mr. Feguer's, in 1963, was the last. States, in contrast, have executed people at the rate of about 100 a year in recent times. Yet federal executions have been performed since this country's birth, and they are expected to continue and actually to increase because the law has been broadened in recent years to include more crimes. "Compared to the states, the federal government has always been a distant follower, not a leader in this area," said Rory Little, an expert on the federal death penalty at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. "The biggest reason why is that federal criminal jurisdiction is limited, and federal law was long reserved for special or interstate crime. Your average local murderer wasn't within the jurisdiction of the feds." Probably the best known deaths were those of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and electrocuted in 1953 at Sing Sing prison, in Ossining, New York. Another spy case also drew wide attention: the 1942 executions of six men who traveled in German submarines to the shores of Long Island and Florida with plans to commit industrial sabotage. And there were the lesser-known crimes handled by federal courts because they were committed on an American Indian reservation, in pre-statehood Alaska, in more than one state, in a national park, on the high seas. Or because a federal agent was killed. By and large, federal prosecutors can choose their cases, a latitude that has prompted concerns that prosecutors in some states are much likelier to push for the death penalty than those in other states. Like most states' death rows, the federal roster includes a disproportionate number of racial minorities. Of the 24 current inmates, 17 are black and three of Hispanic ethnicity, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. But because federal defendants facing the death penalty have strong guarantees of good counsel and judges, many think that there are fewer innocent people who end up on the federal death row. In a few cases, experts say the crimes of federal death row inmates do not seem as heinous as others. "The perfect system would identify only the most aggravated and heinous killers," Mr. Little said. The current one does not always do that. For example, in 1957, George and Michael Krull of Pennsylvania became the first people in Georgia to die by federal execution. The brothers had been convicted of kidnapping and raping, but not killing, a 53-year-old Chattanooga, Tennessee, woman. END top