NEW: ACLU Wants Death Penalty Efforts for Jason Pleau Halted

NEW: ACLU Wants Death Penalty Efforts for Jason Pleau Halted

Claiming that it violates the Department of Justice’s own standards, the RI ACLU four other organizations have asked the United States Solicitor General to “halt any further efforts” by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Rhode Island to seek to impose the death penalty on Jason Wayne Pleau. The letter follows actions by that office to appeal a federal court ruling two weeks ago that Governor Lincoln Chafee acted lawfully in refusing to transfer Pleau‟s custody to the federal government, which is seeking to prosecute him even though he has already agreed to serve a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Calling local U.S. Attorney Peter Neronha’s efforts “troubling,” the four-page letter to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr. argues that “it is not only directly contrary to, and an undermining of, Rhode Island‟s strong and long-standing policy and practice against the imposition of capital punishment, but it is fundamentally at odds with the Department of Justice’s own guidelines and standards. Under the circumstances, any continuing efforts to impose the death penalty in this case create an impression of governmental vengeance, a role ill-befitting the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the notion of what a prosecutor’s role in our criminal justice system should be.”

The letter was signed by the RI ACLU, the RI State Council of Churches, Progreso Latino, Providence Youth Student Movement, and the local chapter of the American Friends Service Committee. Noting that Rhode Island was the second state in the Union to abolish the death penalty in 1852, and it has not carried out an execution since that time, the groups called “inappropriately gratuitous” the U.S. Attorney’s effort “to impose on our state a policy that Rhode Island eliminated more than a century and a half ago.”

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The groups denounced the effort as “especially appalling” because “the Department of Justice’s own standards offer no basis for this course of conduct.” The letter cites various sections of the DOJ‟s United States Attorney’s Manual in support of that point. For example, one policy emphasizes that death penalty cases should be brought “only when the Federal interest in the prosecution is more substantial than the interests of the State or local authorities.”