Disparities of Federal Death Penalty Cited in Petition Seeking Clemency

Contending that the federal death penalty is “fraught with racial and ethnic bias,” attorneys for Juan Raul Garza asked President Clinton to grant clemency to the Texas man, who was convicted of three drug-related murders seven years ago.

The just-released 96-page petition also states that the decision to seek the death penalty against Garza, who is scheduled to be executed Dec. 12, “was as much the happenstance of where his crimes were committed [Texas] as much as any other factor.”

Moreover, the petition contends that Garza’s sentence was disproportionate compared to the sentences sought against and imposed on other individuals convicted of similar offenses--including numerous criminals responsible for more deaths who got life sentences.

And Garza’s lawyers assert that the jury that sentenced him “was denied critically relevant information” regarding the alternative to the death penalty--life without the possibility of release.

“In meeting the awesome responsibility of carrying out an execution, the president cannot permit a death sentence to go forward where there is as much doubt about its propriety as there is in Mr. Garza’s case,” said his attorneys, Greg Wiercioch and Bruce W. Gilchrist.

The lawyers are not seeking Garza’s freedom. Rather, they are asking that he be resentenced to life without the possibility of release. He was convicted of the murders in 1993, and all of his appeals have been denied. The petition states that Garza accepts responsibility for the murders.

Garza’s lawyers do not attempt to minimize his actions. “The friends and loved ones of those victimized by Mr. Garza’s crimes have suffered unimaginable pain and anguish. He is responsible for their suffering and deserves punishment,” the petition states.

On the other hand, the clemency request asks that “consideration also be given to another group of innocent people--the members of Mr. Garza’s family--who seek the president’s mercy in commuting Mr. Garza’s sentence. For them, the grave issues of public concern that arise from Mr. Garza’s sentence give way to the profound private concern of simply keeping him alive.”

Indeed, the petition includes photographs of Garza with family members and letters from several of them--including his 9-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Ann, who said she has visited her father in prison and that they exchange letters and telephone calls.

“I need my Daddy in my life even if he’s far away,” the girl wrote. “He’s my Daddy and the only Daddy I’ll ever have. So please, let my Daddy live.”

Garza’s petition comes at a time when there is considerable ferment about the fairness of how the death penalty is administered. Several senators and many national organizations--including the American Bar Assn. and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People--have called for a moratorium on executions until fairness issues have been resolved.

Garza’s attorneys are relying in part on a recent Justice Department study that found that minorities have been sentenced to death more than four times as often as whites under the federal capital punishment system. Using that study and other research, Garza’s attorneys say a Latino is 2.3 times more likely to be prosecuted for federal capital murder than a white person.

There has not been a federal execution since 1963. Garza was scheduled to die Aug. 5. But three days before that, Clinton delayed the execution so Garza could utilize new federal clemency guidelines.

Garza’s attorneys stressed that the Justice Department study also “reveals an astonishing level of geographic disparity in the administration of the federal death penalty.”

Their client was sentenced to death under a federal drug kingpin statute enacted in 1988. The federal death penalty law was modified in 1994, and in 1995 the Justice Department adopted protocols creating a review committee in the department to determine when government attorneys would seek capital punishment.

Texas has executed 232 people as a result of prosecutions in state courts since the Supreme Court permitted capital punishment to be reinstated in 1976. That number is far and away the highest in the nation.

The Justice Department study found that federal prosecutors in just eight states have submitted 20 or more requests for permission to file federal capital charges. Of those states, Texas is the only one where the Justice Department has authorized prosecutors to seek the death penalty more than 50% of the time.

And Garza’s lawyers note that before the protocols were adopted in 1995 “every one of the capital defendants prosecuted by U.S. attorneys in Texas was Hispanic.”

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno said she found the racial and geographic disparities in the study troubling when it was released earlier this month. But Reno also said that the disparities do not warrant a halt to executions because the Justice Department did not uncover claims of actual innocence among current death row inmates.

“Taken to its logical conclusion . . . that position as applied to particular cases is not just wrong but unconscionable,” Garza’s lawyers stated in the clemency petition. “It sanctions the execution of defendants who, but for their race or ethnicity, might never have been sentenced to death; and it demeans human life by implying that, for defendants who cannot prove their innocence, there is no legal or moral distinction between executing them and imprisoning them.”