The federal execution rush.

Virtually every study done on the death penalty shows that it does not reduce or deter crime. But that didn't stop Congress last year from making sixty new federal crimes punishable by death. And the federal government seems to be itching to use its brand-new $300,000 death chamber, located just outside the razor wire at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

At the request of the Justice Department, the Bureau of Prisons set a March 30 execution date for David Ronald Chandler, even though Chandler hasn't completed his appeals process.

Originally convicted in 1991 under a provision of the 1988 "drug-kingpin" statute that makes murder in connection with a "continuing criminal enterprise" a capital offense, Chandler is one of six men who have been sentenced to die by U.S. courts. He could be the first prisoner to die at Uncle Sam's hands since 1963.

Luckily for Chandler, a judge granted a stay in short order. "We had told the government that we'd be filing our appeal no later than March 31, so we don't know why they did this," says Atlanta lawyer Jack Martin, a veteran of more than a dozen capital cases. "The favorable explanation is, they're just bureaucrats who do things without thinking. The worst motivation to attribute to them would be that they did it to play with Chandler's mind."

The Bureau of Prisons took the opportunity to show off its new facility to the media on March 22. In addition to constructing the lethal-injection building, officials at Terre Haute have inmates renovating a fifty-cell wing of the prison that's supposed to become the new federal death row. Yet it may never be used.

When Congress reintroduced the federal death penalty in 1988, in the midst of a national crime scare, it neglected to specify the method of execution. The day George Bush left office, the Justice Department hastily promulgated a set of regulations stating that the federally condemned would die by the needle at a U.S. prison. But last year's crime bill says that anyone sentenced to die under its provisions can be executed by a state. So the new federal death row may be nothing more than an expensive boondoggle.

"The federal death penalty is just one more example of what a worse-than-useless gimmick capital punishment is," says David Bruck of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Center. "It's crowding out sober discussion of what really might work in terms of reducing crime, and it's enormously expensive."

The Chandler case is another example of the legal problems with the death penalty. "Chandler may turn out to be one of a number of inmates who have been found innocent," Bruck says.

Indeed, after reinvestigating virtually every aspect of Chandler's case and trial, Jack Martin and co-counsel Natasha Zalkin filed a ninety-one-page document with the court in March that shows the prosecution withheld evidence and used perjured and inaccurate testimony to convict Chandler. Of the five witnesses who originally testified against Chandler, three have since stepped forward to say their testimony was coerced by the prosecution or law-enforcement officers, and have recanted. Martin and Zalkin have also found witnesses who contradict the testimony of the fourth witness, and have discovered that the fifth has a history of mental illness which manifests itself in the form of pathological lying.

"It was a pretty thin case to begin with," says Martin. "But in many ways, it's a classic death-penalty case--ambitious prosecutor and an overworked and underfunded original defense attorney without any real capital-case experience."