New York ? The federal death penalty was declared unconstitutional Monday by a judge who said too many innocent people have been executed before they could be vindicated.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff is the first federal judge to declare the 1994 Death Penalty Act unconstitutional, said Lee Ginsberg, lawyer for one of the defendants whose case led to the decision. Monday’s ruling would not affect individual states’ death penalty statutes.

The federal government was expected to appeal the ruling, which came in the case of two alleged drug dealers accused of killing an informant.

“In light of Judge Rakoff’s decision, we are considering our appellate options,” said Herb Hadad, a spokesman for U.S. Atty. James Comey.

Rakoff, who warned prosecutors in April that he was considering the move, said in his 28-page ruling that the law violated the due process rights of defendants. Prosecutors argued the Supreme Court already has concluded that the Constitution’s due process safeguards do not guarantee perfect or infallible outcomes.

Rakoff found that the best available evidence indicates that, “on the one hand, innocent people are sentenced to death with materially greater frequency than was previously supposed and that, on the other hand, convincing proof of their innocence often does not emerge until long after their convictions.”

He based his findings on a number of studies of state death penalty cases. He said he used those studies because the number of federal death sentences 31 was too small to draw any conclusions.

Only two people, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and drug killer Juan Garza, have been executed under the federal law. Of the remaining 29, five were reversed. The government said none of the 31 defendants was later found to be innocent.

Prosecutors had argued that federal death row inmates had greater legal protections than state court defendants, but the judge found the opposite was true because the rules of evidence in federal court are more favorable to law enforcement.

“There is no good reason to believe the federal system will be any more successful at avoiding mistaken impositions of the death penalty than the error-prone state systems already exposed,” Rakoff wrote.

Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock criticized the ruling.

“The determination of how to punish criminal activity within the limits of the Constitution is a matter entrusted to the democratically elected legislature, not to the federal judiciary,” she said. “Congress passed the Federal Death Penalty Act to save lives, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly said the death penalty is constitutional.”