A federal judge in Vermont declared the existing national...

A federal judge in Vermont declared the existing national capital punishment law unusable, a decision that could have implications for every defendant facing the federal death penalty. US District Judge William Sessions ruled that the 1994 law had been rendered useless by a series of recent federal cases, including a US Supreme Court ruling in June that found juries and not judges must hand out death sentences. The government is appealing that ruling.
Sessions' decision comes two months after US District Judge Jed Rakoff in New York became the first federal judge to declare the federal law unconstitutional. He cited evidence indicating that innocent people have been put to death.
Unlike Rakoff, though, Sessions said capital punishment itself isn't necessarily unconstitutional. He said the sentence still might be carried out constitutionally if Congress fixed the law. Other federal judges, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, have upheld the Federal Death Penalty Act.
Sessions' ruling came in the case of Donald Fell, 22, who is charged with kidnapping and killing a woman in a November 2000 carjacking. Prosecutors said they would appeal.
Fell's lawyer, Alexander Bunin, called the ruling a landmark decision that could jeopardize cases against every defendant facing the death penalty, including that of Sept. 11 conspiracy suspect Zacarias Moussaoui.
"It's huge," Bunin said. "Every district judge who has a federal death penalty case is going to read this decision. ... This could affect every case that has been charged, at least until Congress fixes it."
Federal prosecutors in Vermont and elsewhere have responded to the recent Supreme Court ruling by taking cases back to grand juries to consider whether the defendants should get the death penalty if convicted.
Sessions ruled that the death penalty law makes no provision for such action.
"If the death penalty is to be part of our system of justice, due process of law and the fair trial guarantees of the Sixth Amendment require that standards and safeguards governing the kinds of evidence juries may consider must be rigorous, and constitutional rights and liberties scrupulously protected," Sessions said.
"To relax those standards invites abuse, and significantly undermines the reliability of decisions to impose the death penalty."
The rulings by Rakoff and Sessions will not affect individual states' death penalty statutes. Thirty-eight US states allow capital punishment.