Lawyers for Federal Death Row Inmate Ask for Commutation

Attorneys for Juan Raul Garza, who is scheduled to be the first person executed under federal death penalty laws in 37 years, filed papers Wednesday asking President Clinton to commute the sentence to life without possibility of parole.

Garza, who was convicted seven years ago of three drug-related murders in Texas, is scheduled to die by injection Dec. 12 at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.

“The process by which Mr. Garza was selected for capital punishment is plagued by systemic bias, disparity and arbitrariness,” according to the petition for commutation filed by Garza’s attorneys, Bruce Gilchrist of Washington and Gregory Wiercioch of the Texas Defender Service in Houston.

To buttress that contention, the attorneys cited a Justice Department study released Tuesday that found wide racial disparity in recommendations for capital punishment from federal prosecutors across the country. About three-fourths of federal defendants recommended for the death penalty over the last five years were minorities. Clinton and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno called the figures troubling.

In addition, the study showed that only 20% of the 20 defendants who received federal death sentences during the last five years were white.

“It would be fundamentally unjust, unfair and unwarranted to carry out a death sentence that is a product of a system in which arbitrary results are produced by long-standing racial bias and geographic disparity,” the clemency petition stated.

Garza’s lawyers also asserted that:

* The Justice Department study and other evidence “demonstrate that racial and ethnic bias was endemic to the selection process in 1992-1993 when the federal government decided to seek the death penalty for Mr. Garza.”

* Garza was “denied an informed jury because the jury that sentenced him was prevented from learning that Mr. Garza, if not executed, would be sentenced by the trial judge to life imprisonment without the possibility of release.”

* Garza’s sentence is disproportionate to the penalties imposed upon his co-defendants, “who were direct participants in the same crimes for which Mr. Garza was sentenced to death and were offered more lenient treatment.”

There is no contention that Garza is innocent. He was convicted in Brownsville in 1993 of ordering the executions of three people as part of a major marijuana smuggling ring.

The papers filed Wednesday were brief. Gilchrist said the defense team would submit a more detailed filing by Sept. 28. New government clemency guidelines also give the defense lawyers an opportunity to make an oral presentation to the Justice Department’s pardon attorney. Gilchrist said that such a request already has been made and granted.