Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of the federal crime of espionage. They were executed for that crime by the State of New York at Sing Sing prison.
Why weren’t the Rosenbergs executed by the federal government, considering the fact that they were convicted of federal crimes?
Zev Steinhardt
Isn’t the death penalty a state by state thing? It’s certainly not a federal nation wide law anyway.
The Federal government certainly has it’s own death penalty (aside from any the individual states have).
Timothy McVeigh was put to death by the federal government in Indiana. But he was executed by the federal government, not the state of Indiana.
Zev Steinhardt
So it seems that since they were tried in New York and since the federal government did not have execution facilities at that time they were also executed in New York.
The federal death penalty is pretty new. If Lee Harvey Oswald had lived, he would have been executed by the State of Texas. Timothy McVeigh was one of the first, if not the first, to be executed by the feds.
I don’t believe that to be the case.
Federal executions have been happening since well before Furhman. List of people executed by the United States federal government - Wikipedia
Also, I believe that Oswald would have been tried by the federal government. It’s true that McKinley’s assassin was tried by New York, as it was not a federal crime to kill the president at the time. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination, it was a federal crime.
Zev Steinhardt
For those doubting his guilt: (wiki)*In 1995, the results of the Venona decryption project were released by the U.S. government, clearly showing Julius Rosenberg’s role as the leader of a productive ring of spies.[54] They show Ethel’s role was more limited. *
Hmmm, interesting. Yes, they were tried in New York but not by New York. They were tried in federal court.
Can a state court issue a death warrant for someone condemned to death by a different jurisdiction?
Zev Steinhardt
My question has nothing to do with whether or not they were truly guilty or not. I don’t really want to go down that rabbit hole.
Zev Steinhardt
Yes, looks like I was not quite correct. I had always heard there was no federal death penalty at the time of JFK’s assassination. But checking the entry for Capital punishment by the United States federal government, I read, “Only in cases where the crime was committed in a territory, the District of Columbia, or a state without the death penalty was it the norm for the court to designate the state in which the death penalty would be carried out, as the federal prison system lacked an execution facility.” So it would have been Texas that executed Oswald, just for a different reason than I thought.
Couldn’t the federal court issue the warrant, addressed to an official of the state?
Until well into the nineteenth century there were no federal prisons, and those given custodial sentences by the federal courts were detained in state prisons. I have always assumed that the federal court simply issued a warrant authorising the relevant state officials to detain the prisoner, and production of this warrant would have been an answer to any habeas corpus proceedings brought by the prisoner.
So, if I’m right in thinking that that’s how the feds authorised the detention of convicts in state prisons, why couldn’t the authorise the execution of convicts in state prisons in the same way?
Killing a president was not made a federal crime until 1965, in large part because of the Kennedy assassination. (It was one of the recommendations of the Warren Commission.) I remember this being discussed at the time. Oswald would have been tried by the state of Texas for murder.
Would there have been any designation of the method of execution? Did the feds just say “death”, and not care about how it was done?
Outside of a few major cities, that’s still how the federal system deals with jailing federal criminal defendants before they’re tried. The person is sent to a local jail that has an agreement with the feds to accept their prisoners (for cash, of course).
The Federal government’s own exeuction centre uses lethal injection. If the execution is farmed out to state authorities (which SFAIK hasn’t happened since the federal government opened its own facility) current law is that the method of execution used is to be that of the state in which the conviction takes place. If that’s not a death-penalty state, then the sentencing judge has to nominate a death-penalty state whose method of execution is to be used - presumably, this will be the state which is to administer the penalty.
I’ve no idea, however, if that was the law or practice when the Rosenbergs were convicted.
The case of Marvin Gabrion is a modern example of this happening. Michigan has no death penalty, yet this murderer was given the death penalty for his crimes, because they made a federal case out of him. He’s on death row in a federal facility that’s not in Michigan.
Right. But note the Lincoln assassination conspiracy members were tried in Federal court due to it taking place in DC.
So was Charles Guiteau, Garfield’s assassin, since the murder took place in DC. Leon Czolgosz, McKinley’s assassin, was tried by New York State in Erie County.
However, looking into this further, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia serves both as a federal court and as a municipal criminal court for the District. I would assume that the murder charges would have been local ones, rather than federal.
Everything in DC is federal. It might also be local, but it’s still federal.