Conferees Strip Death Penalty From Crime Bill

Congressional negotiators stripped from a massive anti-crime bill Friday night controversial death penalty and assault rifle provisions that many lawmakers had hoped to use in campaigns before the Nov. 6 elections.

In a dramatic showdown, Senate and House conferees threw out of the bill altogether a proposed ban on semiautomatic assault firearms and a major expansion of the federal death penalty.

Senate negotiators had refused to scrap the assault firearm ban, and House conferees had blocked the death penalty expansion by insisting on a key safeguard for defendants being sentenced.

The two sides deadlocked also on sweeping proposals to limit appeals by Death Row inmates and to increase the ability of prosecutors to use illegally seized evidence at trial, and they removed those items from the bill as well, retaining only a collection of far less controversial, though significant, provisions.

The stripped-down omnibus crime bill, expected to be passed before the 101st Congress adjourns this weekend, will furnish more tools to fight savings and loan fraud, authorize $900 million for local police agencies, provide $300 million for states to develop alternatives to overcrowded prisons, add hundreds of federal law enforcement agents and prosecutors, increase penalties for child pornography and crack down on athletes’ use of steroids.

The action by conferees on differing Senate and House crime bills was a major setback for President Bush. Since early 1989, he has pushed for an expansion of the federal death penalty, a limitation on habeas corpus appeals filed by prisoners who face execution and a liberalization of rules governing evidence seized by police, particularly in drug cases.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the prime sponsor of the Senate crime measure, sought to present the outcome in the best possible light.

“The stuff police really want was left in the bill,” Biden said. “For example, though I offered the death penalty amendment, the fact is that local police don’t care much about the federal death penalty. It doesn’t affect much of anything, in all honesty. Everything else, from law enforcement money to child pornography, is still in the bill.”

Biden added that “next year, we’re going to go back at it” or go over the jettisoned provisions covering the death penalty, habeas corpus appeals, assault weapons restrictions and the so-called exclusionary rule on illegally seized evidence.

The leading conservative sponsors of anti-crime legislation, Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) and Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.), expressed bitter disappointment at the conferees’ action.

“It’s a disgrace that this conference has not passed out a crime bill to protect this country from criminals,” said Thurmond, telling proponents that “you’re deceiving the people if you call this a crime bill.”

McCollum said it was so “outrageous” that he might urge Bush to veto the measure.

The main stumbling block to an agreement was the death penalty.

The government has been without a broad death penalty since 1972, when the Supreme Court struck down all capital punishment laws because they left too much discretion to juries in sentencing. The court prescribed certain procedures for the penalty to be restored.

The new procedures were adopted by Congress in listing two crimes for the federal death penalty in 1974 and 1988: airline hijackings that result in death and drug-trafficking murders.

But about 30 federal crimes that were knocked off the death penalty books in 1972, including the intentional killing of the President, have never been reinstated. This year’s crime bills would have done so.

However, the House version carried a provision that would let defendants escape execution if they could prove that their sentence had been imposed because of racial discrimination. Bush vigorously opposed this provision, called the Racial Justice Act, contending that it would virtually negate capital punishment because it would be nearly impossible for prosecutors to rebut race-based statistics.

Led by Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), House negotiators insisted on keeping this “safeguard,” which the Senate refused to accept, creating the deadlock.