Reagan Backs Death Penalty, Curbs on Courts

President Reagan, renewing his effort to toughen the nation’s criminal laws, called Friday for restoration of the death penalty for certain offenses and urged Congress to cooperate in a campaign to make America “safe and secure again for our children.”

In unveiling the Criminal Justice Reform Act of 1987, Reagan put forward two other longtime Administration proposals: to reduce a judge’s latitude in throwing out criminal cases when police officers make technical errors and to restrict a criminal’s right to appeal a state case to a federal court.

The Administration sought unsuccessfully to put these measures into law in 1984, when Congress passed the Administration’s Comprehensive Crime Control Act, and Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III has since spoken out frequently in favor of such revisions, although Congress has demonstrated strong opposition to the proposals.

Expands Exclusionary Rule

Perhaps the most far-reaching of the measures contained in the new Administration bill would be an attempt to expand a principle adopted by the Supreme Court in 1985 when it ruled that the exclusionary rule, which excludes improperly gathered evidence from consideration during a trial, could not be applied if the police could demonstrate that they acted in good faith even if they had made technical errors.

As outlined Friday by Reagan, the bill would greatly expand that good-faith exception by applying it to searches carried out without warrants--which constitute the vast majority of searches by law enforcement officers.

On the death penalty, Reagan said he sought to repair the faults in federal laws that already call for death as a punishment for certain crimes. There have been no executions under federal law since the Supreme Court held more than a decade ago that the punishment had not been uniformly applied.

Espionage, Treason, Murder

The new Administration proposal would establish new guidelines to enable the death penalty to be applied in cases such as espionage, treason and aggravated murder.

The new legislation described by the President also would limit application of the doctrine of habeas corpus --the principle that prevents governments from detaining persons without pressing criminal charges.

Convicted criminals have used that doctrine to challenge state court convictions in federal court by claiming that the state decision was defective--a procedure Reagan said was “misused by federal courts to second-guess valid state criminal convictions.”