THE HAND ON THE NEEDLE

May 16, 2006

Ashes to ashes, the first being the ghostly hand of John Ashcroft, the second the ashes of a twenty-something Donald Fell who will be killed by that hand, unanimously approved by twelve Vermonters.

On June 16th, Federal District Court Judge William K. Sessions III, will officially (and I assume unwillingly) pronounce a sentence which has not been issued in Vermont since 1957 in a state which 30 years later officially abolished its death penalty.

Donald Fell, admitting to the murder of Terry King, had concluded a plea bargain with federal prosecutors — life imprisonment without possibility of parole in return for a guilty plea. But the Bush administration was not satisfied. Instead, prompted by the King family, Fell‘s became one of 12 plea bargains rejected by John Ashcroft — at the time Bush’s Attorney General —in a pattern targeting abolitionist states by imposing death-penalty requirements upon them.

In September, 2002, Judge Sessions declared the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 unconstitutional, arguing that the measure deprived defendants of their rights under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the Constitution, a ruling later reversed by the US Court of Appeals and declined by the US Supreme Court for review. Score a big one for Bush and Ashcroft overruling their own prosecutors. And for Death.

The Bush administration’s aggressive pursuit of federal capital punishment comes at a time when other government officials and society as a whole, are increasingly skeptical of its justice. Issues of racial disparity, incompetent representation, and execution methodology are all in the news, but the federal push goes on in a conscious attempt to normalize state killing. States like Vermont that do not have the death penalty cannot opt out of federal laws even if they oppose them.

Gene Primomo, a federal public defender for Fell, commented on the long and difficult death-penalty process. "It's an inside-the-Beltway exercise by the attorney general for political points." And prosecuting attorney Peter Hall noted that his office was obligated to pursue a capital case against Fell regardless of the earlier agreement. Justice Department officials said Ashcroft's review of plea agreements would help ensure that heinous cases would be punished by death.

Such interventions by the Bush administration are consistent with its larger agenda of maximum control by a “unitary executive”, privileged to ignore what laws it will, controlling every branch of government. The death penalty now rules in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so it will here, once more, in the Green Mountains. 

Dies irae, dies illa,

Solvet saeclum in favilla...


That day, the day of wrath,

Will turn the universe to ashes...