Bush Calls for Quick Passage of Bill That Expands Death Penalty, Limits Appeals

President Bush urged Congress Monday to enact in 100 days a crime bill that sharply expands the federal death penalty and limits appeals by convicts, saying that Gulf War “veterans deserve to come home to an America where it is safe to walk the streets.”

Bush frequently recalled America’s success in the Gulf as he issued his call for legislative action on the bill, which includes hard-line provisions that were stripped from last year’s crime bill by a House-Senate conference committee. For example, it would allow the death penalty for a total of 41 crimes.

In addition, it provides greater penalties, including capital punishment, for terrorists in the United States or abroad who use weapons of mass destruction, including bombs, gas and biological or radiological weapons.

The measure would also ease rules against court admission of illegally seized evidence. For example, it would allow the introduction of illegally seized firearms if the case involved violence, a serious drug offense or a defendant who was barred from possessing a weapon because of a prior conviction.

“We stood by our troops, and today it’s time to stand up for America’s prosecutors and police,” Bush declared at a White House meeting of state attorneys general.

Two Democrats who will play key roles on the passage of any crime legislation took issue with the Administration’s failure to propose gun controls.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said a bill could be passed in the 100-day timetable set by Bush if it banned the manufacture of assault weapons and provided more federal funding for state and local law enforcement. The Administration opposes both provisions.

Although agreeing with the Administration’s approach of imposing stiffer penalties on criminals who use assault weapons, Biden added: “We should get the most deadly weapons off the streets before they are used to kill and maim anyone else.”

Legislation that Biden is introducing includes such a ban.

Rep. Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime and criminal justice, complained that Bush’s bill has “glaring holes” in dealing with violence in the streets.

Schumer said he plans to proceed with the so-called Brady Amendment requiring a seven-day waiting period before purchase of a handgun. The amendment is named for James S. Brady, a former White House press secretary who was severely wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on then-President Ronald Reagan. The Administration backs the National Rifle Assn. in opposing that legislation.

A Justice Department drafter of the Administration bill countered: “Real gun control starts with taking guns out of the hands of violent felons and putting them (the felons) away.”

Several crime victims were invited to attend the President’s presentation of the bill, the Comprehensive Violent Crime Control Act of 1991, at ceremonies in the East Room of the White House.

The victims included Collene Thompson Campbell of San Juan Capistrano, Calif. Her son, Scott, was murdered in 1982, and her brother, auto racer Mickey Thompson, and his wife, Trudy, were gunned down in 1989 in front of their Bradbury, Calif., home.

Limits on repeated appeals by killers are “critical to any crime victim,” Campbell said in an interview after the ceremony. Such appeals are “tremendously painful” to survivors, she said.

The bill would give a convict a one-year period in which to file an appeal in federal courts after exhausting all state appeals. The habeas corpus provisions would also set deadlines for the federal courts. A district court would have to rule within six months from the time it heard an appeal, and appellate courts would have the same time limit.

The Administration measure would require federal courts to defer to rulings by state courts as long as the state proceeding was “full and fair.”

The bill calls also for a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for possession of a firearm by any person previously convicted of a drug offense or violent crime. A Justice Department official who worked on the bill said that that provision represented “a tremendous commitment to using federal prison space” for violent criminals.

The official noted that, although the bill allows illegally seized firearms to be introduced as evidence, it requires that the attorney general establish a system of penalties--up to dismissal--for FBI, drug enforcement and immigration agents who violate search and seizure restrictions.

As well as making sure that 18 federal crimes now carrying the death penalty conform to Supreme Court requirements, the Administration’s bill would extend the death penalty to 23 other crimes. Those new categories range from terrorist murders of American nationals abroad to racially motivated killings.

Biden noted that his measure would go further, providing the death penalty for 44 offenses.

If Biden and Schumer indeed represent other Democrats in seeming to go along with some of the Administration’s toughest approaches, eventual enactment of the provisions appears likely. And Bush’s call for action in 100 days seems designed to prevent the last-minute negotiations that led to dropping the toughest provisions from last year’s crime bill.