Death Penalty: Federal Exceptions

Given the seriousness of the 9/11 attacks and America's reputation for capital punishment, Zacarias Moussaoui's life sentence may come as a surprise.

But had he been executed he would have been only the fourth federal prisoner to be punished thus by the US since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 - the most famous of the other three being Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber.

Moussaoui would also have been the first federal prisoner in that period, and one of only a handful in US history, to be executed for a crime other than directly committing murder. Many more convicts are executed by states and by far the biggest number are executed by one, Texas, which has killed 362 prisoners since 1976.

In total, 38 out of 50 states permit the death penalty, though three have not used it since its reintroduction. The death penalty was suspended voluntarily by states and the federal government in 1967 while the question was tackled by the supreme court, which made the suspension compulsory in 1972 by ruling that 40 death penalty statutes were unconstitutional. But it did not declare the death penalty unconstitutional, leaving the way open for states to rewrite their laws, which they duly did.

The number of people executed nationally has stayed fairly steady since 2001 at 60-70 a year. A death sentence for Moussaoui would have been vulnerable to appeal because, in recent rulings, the supreme court seemed to come close to declaring it unconstitutional for prisoners to be executed when they did not directly commit murder.