Opinion: Excessive consistency

It must rankle Attorney General John Ashcroft that some Northeastern states don't share his enthusiasm for the death penalty. While New York, New Jersey and a number of other states in the region have capital punishment, it is rarely applied. Prosecutors are far less likely to seek the ultimate penalty than those in such states as Texas, Virginia, Missouri (Ashcroft's home state) and Florida. Since 1976, the South has executed 678 people to the Northeast's three.

The attorney general has lost patience with the Northeast. Ashcroft is ordering local prosecutors to seek the death penalty for a dozen defendants in New York and Connecticut, even though prosecutors there had explicitly recommended against the use of capital punishment or had not sought it.

Across the country, Ashcroft has affected the cases of 28 defendants by insisting that the death penalty be pursued contrary to the judgment of the local U.S. Attorneys' Offices.

The Justice Department is justifying these actions by arguing that it is the department's job to make sure the federal death penalty is consistently applied around the country.

The department is right that consistency is an integral part of justice, that equivalent crimes receive similar punishments wherever they are committed. One of the troubling aspects of the death penalty within states is its crazy-quilt application, where some prosecutors pursue it aggressively and others not at all. But the way to create consistency is to reduce capital cases in places where it is too routinely applied.

As an attorney for one of the New York defendants told the New York Times: "(Justice Department officials) want to set a consistent national standard for these cases, but the standards they're using are the standards used by Texas district attorneys running for re-election."

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