Follow this link to tell President-elect Obama that he should issue an executive order soon after taking office to establish a moratorium on federal executions and directing the Justice Department to establish new rules to protect innocent people from execution, for instance by having the federal government not seek the death penalty in any prosecutions during his term in office and to use federal money to better fund state-level innocence protection programs. You can also give him your other ideas on reforming the criminal justice system.

http://change.gov/page/s/ofthepeople

The page linked to above on Obama’s new transition website invites people to “tell us your ideas and help us solve the biggest challenges facing our country.”

“Since the federal government got back into the death penalty business in 1988, attorneys general have authorized 420 prosecutions, according to statistics kept by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project: 180 during the 1990s, an average of 18 per year, and 240 since 2000, an average of 40 per year, mostly attributable to the Bush administration. “Of the 420 authorized prosecutions, 162 actually reached trial and sentencing. Juries imposed 105 life sentences and 57 death sentences. Since 2001, the beginning of the Bush administration, there have been 32 federal defendants sentenced to death .” (Marcia Coyle, National Law Journal, April 30, 2007).

Minorities Dominate Federal Death Penalty Prosecutions
Since 1988, the federal government has authorized seeking the death penalty against 382 defendants. Of the 382 approved prosecutions, 278 (73%) were against minority defendants. Of these defendants, 104 have been white, 64 Hispanic, 16 Asian/Indian/Pacific Islander, 3 Arab and 195 African American. Of the 44 inmates currently on federal death row, 26 (59%) are members of a minority group.
(Source: Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project (June 28, 2006)).

More information on the Federal Death Penalty

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