No more mandatory death penalty.

Guilty of first-degree murder in Washington, DC? The jury will have to decide. Do they give you the death penalty, or not? Before today a DC jury had no choice: the death penalty was mandatory for murder 1. But JFK just changed that by signing a new law, HR 5143 (PL87-423), and since DC was the last district to enforce mandatory death, the new law really kills it across the nation. Not that JFK is soft on crime. The new default sentence is life in prison, possibly with parole. That ain’t no vacation.