They are an ignominious bunch: two Bronx heroin dealers who murdered an informant, a father and son who killed three people in a drug deal, a Brooklyn gangster hired in the killing of a husband for the victim's wife.

These five men are linked not only by the nature of their crimes but by the fact that federal juries in New York decided that they should not be put to death.

In the 20 years since the federal death penalty statute was revived, no federal juries have been more reluctant to sentence federal defendants to death than those in New York. According to records compiled by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, which coordinates the defense of capital punishment cases, federal prosecutors in New York State have asked juries to impose death sentences 19 times since 1988. In only one case did a jury rule for execution.

Nationwide, federal prosecutors win death penalties about one-third of the time, according to the group's statistics.

But despite this track record, the cases have not stopped coming: In Brooklyn alone, there are six more capital cases on the docket this year, including those of a reputed Mafioso and of two men charged with killing Guyanese immigrants to collect their life insurance policies. The first of these trials - of Gilberto Caraballo, a Brooklyn drug dealer convicted last month of murdering two rivals - will enter its so-called penalty phase on Monday.

Federal judges in New York have gone so far as to call some death penalty cases a waste of time and money. Last week, Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Federal District Court in Brooklyn told prosecutors that their chances of obtaining a death sentence against a drug dealer charged with dismembering two rivals were "virtually nil" and issued an order in which he said he was waiting for the Justice Department to reconsider whether to pursue an execution.

Officials in the federal prosecutors' offices in Brooklyn and Manhattan, as well as the Department of Justice in Washington, declined to comment on their record in death penalty cases.

Lawyers and other experts in the field say that a variety of reasons underpin New York's status as a tough sell in death penalty cases. They say that there is a fundamental liberal slant to juries in the state, and that New York has some of the best death penalty defense lawyers in the country.

They also say many victims in New York capital cases are unsavory characters: drug dealers, mobsters or members of street gangs - not the sort of people whose killers are likely to be punished with death.

"New York has the worst batting average in the country," said Kevin McNally, a defense lawyer in Kentucky and the director of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project. Federal juries in Connecticut and New Jersey have never ruled for death since 1988, but only three cases have gone before juries in those two states.

Mr. McNally said that statistics in federal death penalty cases tended to mirror those in state cases, and that in places like Virginia, Mississippi and Texas, where the state death penalty is active, there were also more death sentences imposed in the federal courts. (New York's death penalty statute was effectively invalidated in 2004 by the state's highest court.)

Ephraim Savitt, a defense lawyer in New York who has handled several capital cases, said that New York jurors "fancy themselves as liberal," adding "Ultimately we have a very cosmopolitan, eclectic, heterogeneous population, and the death penalty requires unanimity." In federal courts, as in some states, all 12 members of the jury must approve the death penalty.

Mr. Savitt was the lead lawyer for Ronell Wilson, a Staten Island gang member sentenced to die last year in the only imposition of the federal death penalty in New York since 1954, when Gerhard Puff, a bank robber, was executed for killing an F.B.I. agent. The victims in the Wilson case, two undercover police detectives, were crucial in the jury's decision, both Mr. Savitt and Mr. McNally said. Crucial and unusual, they added, in that the detectives were perceived as "innocent" and "good."

"Not many New York cases have 'innocent victims,' " Mr. McNally said. He added that white female victims, for example, w! ere "death in a bottle for defense lawyers."

Mr. Wilson's case is on appeal. Only three people have been executed under the revived federal death penalty: Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, in 2001; Juan Raul Garza, a drug dealer who killed three other drug traffickers in Texas, in 2001; and Louis Jones Jr., who kidnapped, raped and killed a 19-year-old female soldier in Texas in 2003.

The question of whether to pursue the death penalty in a federal case typically begins with a special committee within the United States attorney's office in each federal distri! ct (New York has four; Connecticut and New Jersey, one each). The committee makes a recommendation to the Department of Justice in Washington, where the attorney general must sign off on the case.

In the past, particularly during John Ashcroft's tenure as attorney general, the United States attorney's offices in Brooklyn and Manhattan had trouble with Washington. In 2003, for instance, Mr. Ashcroft ordered both offices to pursue the death penalty in 10 cases in which local prosecutors had recommended against it.

While officials in both offices declined to comment on their current death penalty cases, the prior troubles could be read as an indication of ambivalence about the death penalty.

In the Manhattan federal court, the most striking example is a 2002 decision by Judge Jed S. Rakoff, who ruled that the federal death penalty was unconstitutional. Writing in the case of the two heroin dealers who killed an informant, Judge Rakoff cited the growing number of exonerations of death row inmates and ruled that the death penalty was "tantamount to foreseeable, state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings." The decision was eventually overturned on appeal.

There have been even more instances of judicial displeasure in Brooklyn's federal system, where it might be said that a quiet bench revolt against the death penalty is taking place.

In Judge Weinstein's order last week, he noted that the defendant, Humberto Pepin Taveras, had agreed to plead guilty in order to obtain a lesser sentence and pointed out that the costs of the case had already reached $1.5 million and were likely to increase.

Other Brooklyn judges in recent years have spoken out against the death penalty from the bench and in print. Last March, Judge Frederic Block wrote an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times in which he questioned the "enormous costs and burdens to the judicial system" caused by the death penalty. In 2003, his colleague Judge John Gleeson wrote an article for The Virginia Law Review in which he called Mr. Ashcroft's decision to force prosecutors to seek the death penalty against their own recommendations "a bad idea."

Another Brooklyn jurist, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis, has by his own count twice asked the Justice Department to reconsider the death penalty in cases he has overseen. The concerns raised about the death penalty by judges presiding over such cases was reported in The New York Sun.

In an interview last week, Judge Garaufis said that he was not aware of any coordinated effort by Brooklyn judges to oppose the death penalty, though he also said he was not aware of any other federal bench across the country that seemed to question the practice so openly and often.

"There are judges - and I'm not speaking for them - who clearly look upon the death penalty as so unlikely to be ordered by a jury that it's not worthwhile to pursue it," he said. "Especially because the alternative is life in prison without the possibility of release."


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