Donald Fell case: Bush administration attempts to impose death penalty on Vermont

No one has been executed in the New England state since two killers died in the electric chair in 1954. No one has been sentenced to death in Vermont since 1957, a sentence that was later commuted, and no has stood trial facing death since 1962. The state officially abolished the death penalty in 1987. So how is it possible that Fell faces that possibility?

The Bush administration, making use of Clinton-era legislation, is attempting to impose the death penalty on states that have dared to outlaw it or fail to carry it out. Like the proponents of slavery in the pre-Civil War era, the advocates of capital punishment are not content to defend the barbaric practice in areas where it is widely practiced; they feel obliged to aggressively extend its use, even in the face of widespread opposition.

The Fell case is horrifying and tragic, too typically American, in all its dimensions. Donald Fell, sexually abused as a child, abandoned by his mother, a heavily drug-addicted individual from an early age, was a terrible act waiting to happen.

That act unfolded in late November 2000. According to prosecutors, Fell, then 20, and Robert J. Lee, 21, killed Fell’s mother and a friend of hers in a Rutland, Vermont, apartment. Seeking to flee town, they abducted Tressa King, 53, outside the downtown supermarket where she worked and drove with her into New York state. There they kicked and beat her to death. The pair were arrested, in the stolen car, a few days later in Arkansas. Lee hung himself at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in Vermont in September 2001. His death was ruled accidental.

Because the case involved the crossing of state lines, federal authorities claimed jurisdiction. “Next,” writes Greg Guma of the Vermont Guardian, a statewide weekly, “when the U.S. attorney’s office made a plea agreement to spare Fell’s life—instead offering a lifetime jail sentence with no chance for parole—US Attorney General John Ashcroft said no way. An eye-for-an-eye conservative, Ashcroft insisted on putting death on the table. The point was the state’s right—actually make that the federal government’s right to order a state’s residents—to kill someone.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/vrmt-j27.shtml