End of the Line

For only the second time since it was enacted in 1988, a federal statute has been invoked to permit capital punishment for violent drug traffickers. In this case, the sentencing came against a trio of brutal Richmond, Virginia, cocaine dealers who murdered 11 people over a two-month period while running a lucrative crack gang called the New York Boyz. In one instance the gang burst into the house of a woman who owed them a few hundred dollars and shot her dead.