Senate Rejects Bush Plan to Relax Evidence Rules

The Senate on Tuesday scuttled President Bush’s plan to allow the expanded use of illegally obtained evidence in criminal trials, but it approved a proposal to greatly widen the scope of the federal death penalty.

The separate votes on provisions of an omnibus anti-crime bill came as Democrats and Republicans each vied to appear tougher than the other in a clear bid for advantage in next year’s elections. The contest will continue in coming days over moves to restrict Death Row appeals, ban semiautomatic assault weapons and impose a waiting period on handgun purchases.

Under various Supreme Court decisions, prosecutors can introduce illegally seized evidence in a trial only if police had a search warrant and made a technical mistake in their search, such as going to the wrong address because of a typographical error in the warrant.

Bush sought to loosen this rule by allowing use of evidence that had been seized even without a warrant, as long as police had obtained the gun, cocaine or other evidence in “good-faith” conformance with the Constitution’s protection against runaway searches.

Voting 54 to 43, the Senate rejected the Republican-sponsored Bush plan in favor of a Democratic alternative that would codify the high court’s decisions on the so-called exclusionary rule.

Sen. John Seymour (R-Calif.) supported the Bush proposal, while Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) opposed it.

In a separate vote, the Senate endorsed a plan to restore the federal death penalty for 23 crimes and extend it to 26 others. A similar proposal was approved by the Senate last year, but it died without becoming law.

This year’s list of crimes subject to the death penalty was crafted in a compromise agreement between Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and the panel’s ranking Republican, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

By a 68-30 vote, the senators defeated an amendment by Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) to require life imprisonment without parole instead of death for the specified federal crimes. Cranston voted for the Simon amendment, while Seymour opposed it.

In seeking to restore the federal death penalty, the Senate bill provides procedural safeguards for defendants that the Supreme Court, ruling in 1972, said were necessary to make capital punishment constitutional. They include a separate sentencing trial at which a series of aggravating and mitigating factors must be considered.

Currently, only two federal crimes--murder by aircraft hijacking and murder by a “drug kingpin”--are deemed to meet the safeguards. The pending bill would restore the death penalty for crimes ranging from assassination of the President to murder of a poultry inspector.

Thurmond, who championed Bush’s proposal to relax the rule excluding illegally seized evidence from trials, argued that it would close “a legal loophole that often allows a criminal to go free.”

Biden said that relaxing the rule would net only a “minuscule” number of additional criminals at the risk of violating the rights of many innocent citizens.