San Juan, Puerto Rico ? By all accounts, the crime was horrific. Kidnappers demanding a $1 million ransom killed and dismembered a suburban grocer in 1998 after his family alerted police.

Now, federal prosecutors in this U.S. territory are seeking the death penalty for the defendants, a strategy that is stoking debate about the Caribbean island’s relationship with the United States. That debate already has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Most people here contend that seeking the death penalty in the trial starting today infringes on Puerto Ricans’ right to self-government and violates their constitutional ban on capital punishment.

Puerto Rico carried out its last execution in 1927.

“It’s not right for the U.S. to impose a law that Puerto Ricans had no hand in crafting,” said territorial Sen. Fernando Martin, a member of the Independence Party.

The island’s 4 million people are American citizens, but have no vote in Congress.

The Puerto Rico Bar Assn., two anti-death penalty groups and defense attorneys also argued that the death penalty could not be sought because the island’s constitution banned it.

Their argument ultimately was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the island is subject to federal law.

“We do not believe in capital punishment and we feel that what has happened is an affront to our relationship (with the United States),” said Arturo Luis Davila-Toro, president of the Puerto Rico Bar Assn.

Gov. Sila Calderon, who has called capital punishment immoral, said it would be inappropriate for her to intervene. However, her mentor, former Gov. Rafael Hernandez Colon, said the case exemplified why his political party was seeking more self-governing powers in the commonwealth’s current arrangement with Washington.

Hector “Gordo” Acosta Martinez and Joel Rivera Alejandro are accused of kidnapping Jorge Hernandez Diaz during the night of Feb. 11, 1998, as he left his store in the San Juan suburb of Rio Piedras. The grocer’s kidnappers warned he would be killed and “cut to pieces” if his family notified authorities or refused to pay the ransom.

When they learned police were investigating, the kidnappers shot the grocer, hacked off his head and limbs, and dumped the body parts along a road, according to prosecutors.

The defendants are charged with first-degree murder and extortion.

This is the first of 59 cases in Puerto Rico in which federal prosecutors have invoked the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act, which broadened the range of crimes punishable by death.

Puerto Rico abolished capital punishment in 1929, two years after farmworker Pascual Ramos was executed for beheading his boss with a machete.

The U.S. military government had executed 23 people — mostly poor or illiterate, and black — since American troops seized the island in 1898 during the Spanish-American War.

If Acosta Martinez and Rivera Alejandro are convicted and sentenced to death, they will not be executed in Puerto Rico, prosecutors have said.

Rather, they will die by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.