The federal execution rush.

• Author: Vest, Jason
• Position: Cover Story

Virtually every study done on the death penalty shows that it does not reduce or deter crime. But that didn't stop Congress last year from making sixty new federal crimes punishable by death. And the federal government seems to be itching to use its brand-new $300,000 death chamber, located just outside the razor wire at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

At the request of the Justice Department, the Bureau of Prisons set a March 30 execution date for David Ronald Chandler, even though Chandler hasn't completed his appeals process.

Originally convicted in 1991 under a provision of the 1988 "drug-kingpin" statute that makes murder in connection with a "continuing criminal enterprise" a capital offense, Chandler is one of six men who have been sentenced to die by U.S. courts. He could be the first prisoner to die at Uncle Sam's hands since 1963.

Luckily for Chandler, a judge granted a stay in short order. "We had told the government that we'd be filing our appeal no later than March 31, so we don't know why they did this," says Atlanta lawyer Jack Martin, a veteran of more than a dozen capital cases. "The favorable explanation is, they're just bureaucrats who do things without thinking. The worst motivation to attribute to them would be that they did it to play with Chandler's mind."

The Bureau of Prisons took the opportunity to show off its new facility to the media on March 22. In addition to constructing the lethal-injection building, officials at Terre Haute have inmates renovating a fifty-cell wing of the prison that's supposed to become the new federal death row. Yet it may never be used.

When Congress reintroduced the federal death penalty in 1988, in the midst of a national crime scare, it neglected to specify the method of execution. The day George Bush left office, the Justice Department hastily promulgated a set of regulations stating that the federally condemned would die by the needle at a U.S. prison...