U.S. Government

The Federal Government has a sentence of life without parole.

There have been no federal executions since Victor Feguer was hanged in Iowa for kidnapping in 1963. There are 26 men on the federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, not counting three who are awaiting re-sentencing.

There have been three executions by the united States government since 2001: Timothy McVeigh from Oklahoma on June 11, 2001, Juan Raul Garza of Texas on June 19, 2001, and Louis Jones, Jr. of Texas on March 18, 2003. The three cases involved one white, one black, and one hispanic male, and all came from the south.

A 2000 study by the Department of Justice has revealed racial and geographical disparities in the application of the federal death penalty.

In addition to the death penalty laws in many states, the federal government has also employed capital punishment for certain federal offenses. 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. In 1988, a new federal death penalty statute was enacted for murder in the course of a drug-kingpin conspiracy. In 1994, the federal death penalty was expanded to some 60 different offenses.