In addition to the death penalty laws in many states, the federal government has also employed capital punishment for certain
federal offenses.
The United States federal death penalty was first used on June 25, 1790, when Thomas Bird was hanged for murder in Maine.
Since then, according to studies by the Capital Punishment Research Project, 336 men and 4 women have been executed under
federal auspices. Of these inmates, 134 (39%) were white; 118 (35%) black; 63 (19%) Native American; and 25 (7%) were Hispanic
or unknown. In the 20th Century, 61% of federal executions were of minority defendants. See also, Race and the Federal Death Penalty.
The federal government has utilized hanging, electrocution, and the gas chamber to execute these 340 prisoners. The majority
of inmates were executed for murder or crimes resulting in murder, but convictions for piracy, rape, rioting, kidnapping,
and spying and espionage also yielded federal executions. Not including those executed under federal jurisdiction because
their crimes occurred in the District of Columbia, the U.S. executed 34 individuals, including two women, between 1927 and 1963. Prior to the reinstatement of the federal death penalty in 1988, there had been
no federal executions since Victor Feguer was hanged in Iowa for kidnapping in 1963. (In the chart above, the totals include
executions in the District of Columbia, whose government is under federal jurisdiction)
In 1972, the United States Supreme Court ruled that all state death penalty statues were unconstitutional because they
allowed for arbitrary and capricious application. The federal statute suffered from the same infirmities as the state statutes
and no death sentence employing the older federal statutes has been upheld.
For further discussion of the history of the federal death penalty, see R. Little, The Federal Death Penalty:
History and Some Thoughts About the Department of Justice's Role, 26 Fordham Urban Law Journal 347 (1999).
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