No Fanfare as Another Federal Execution Set

Juan Raul Garza most likely will follow Timothy J. McVeigh in death, but his path to the new federal execution chamber could not have been more different.

Twice married, five times a father, he was not a self-proclaimed revolutionary; he was no crusading ideologue. Garza’s cause was his own: drugs and money.

His murder victims were not scores of strangers in a federal office building but rather three members of his own marijuana smuggling operation.

Garza, whose name is barely known outside the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, is scheduled Tuesday to be strapped onto the same execution gurney at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., where McVeigh died June 11.

The world will hardly mark his passing. His death will carry the ignominious footnote of being the second execution by the federal government in 38 years. For his end, only a small group of reporters, police officers and protesters is expected.

And, unlike McVeigh, who twice dropped all legal appeals, Garza will not go quietly. Once considered an escape risk, he now is desperately pleading for the U.S. Supreme Court or the White House to spare him.

“I am at peace with God,” the 44-year-old Garza said in a videotaped plea for mercy made last year in support of executive clemency. “I just . . . the most concern here is for my children . . . that they don’t quite understand why I should be put to death.”

He is a Latino on a federal death row stacked with minorities. He was sentenced to death in 1993 by a federal judge who believes capital punishment is morally wrong.

Convicted Under Kingpins Statute

Law enforcement officials in Brownsville, Texas, consider him a coldhearted killer who is getting his just punishment. One of his victims was his own son-in-law.

“He was mean and greedy and had no respect for human life,” remembered Abel Perez, chief deputy of the Cameron County constable’s office in Brownsville, which lies at the southern tip of the state.

“He loved money, obviously. He had some tough people working under him, and he killed some of them or had them shot. He didn’t have the fancy ranch or the new car yet, but he was getting up there. But then he got out of control.”

Garza was tried and convicted under the federal death penalty statute for drug kingpins. He ordered the murders of two of his victims and killed the third himself--with three shots to the heart. It was always about money, police said, usually that Garza suspected his subordinates of stealing it from him.

Prosecutors also believe he killed or ordered the deaths of five others in Mexico--an allegation they made to the jury.

But defense lawyers said that kind of statement poisoned jurors’ feelings about Garza. In appeals, they have argued that Garza never was “charged, tried or convicted” of the other murders and said the jury was given a much more heinous picture of him than was warranted.

They also noted that Garza since has admitted and apologized for his involvement in the three murders in the U.S. His lawyers say that keeping him in prison for life would allow him to at least try to be a father to his children, one of whom was born a year before he was arrested.

But authorities such as Perez, a supporter of capital punishment, said death is too good for Garza.

“I’m not God. I’m just an investigator. I’m just a Texas peace officer,” he said. “But he went through the courts and the evidence was heard, and the judge and the jury found him guilty, and now his punishment is fine with me.”

U.S. District Senior Judge Filemon Vela, a 66-year-old Jimmy Carter appointee, has been on the federal bench 21 years. Before that, he served six years as a state judge. By his count, he said, he has sentenced 15,000 defendants.

Sentencing Garza to death--he had never before sent anyone to death row--did not come easy.

“It’s not something that you find pride in or cherish,” he said, noting that he was bound by the law once a unanimous jury in 1993 recommended the death penalty. “I am a human being. I don’t particularly look forward to anyone’s death. You understand that?”

When he sentenced Garza, the judge spoke with what compassion he could find.

“There is an appellate process,” he advised Garza, who chose not to speak in his own behalf. “What may ensue, nobody knows. But I will say to you, the only thing I can ask you to consider, is that you start making your peace with your God, sir. God take care of you, sir.”

At a follow-up hearing, he wished him, “Mr. Garza, good luck to you, sir, and may God bless you.”

Garza went off to prison. Twice in Texas, prison authorities found him with weapons they believed he was planning to use to escape--a homemade knife and a saw inside a pair of tennis shoes. Eventually he was housed at the federal super-maximum security prison in Florence, Colo., along with McVeigh, and then in 1999 all of the condemned men were moved to the newly opened death row in Terre Haute.

Last year, Garza was first in line for the prison’s new execution chamber. But then-President Clinton postponed his date with death to give the government time to study whether there were racial disparities in federal cases between who gets death and who lives. Of the 20 men waiting to die now, 18 are minorities.

Lawyers Seeking Stay, Clemency

On June 6, the Justice Department released the findings from that study, declaring there was no evidence of racial bias on death row. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft rejected calls for a death penalty moratorium and said his study concluded that prosecutors were less apt to seek capital punishment against minorities as opposed to whites.

In December, Garza was given a new execution date, June 19, and for a while it appeared he indeed would be first. In May, McVeigh won a 30-day stay because of a flap over newly discovered FBI files in his case, but his appeals did not win out and he again asked to die.

McVeigh went to his death without saying a final word from the gurney.

Garza is going down with a fight.

He has a pending request with the Supreme Court for a stay of execution, with his lawyers arguing that the jury should have been told that the only alternative to death was life without parole--meaning that, either way, he would never leave prison alive.

Garza’s lawyers also have filed a separate pleading with an appellate court in Chicago, contending that he was not given his full rights to due process. And awaiting President Bush’s attention is a 2-inch-thick clemency petition that includes a videotape in which Garza and his family beg for mercy.

“I regret what I’ve done and I’m also shameful,” Garza says on the tape. “I will not disrespect this opportunity if you’ll just give me another chance.”

Also appearing are several Garza family members, including these two daughters:

Norma: “When we went to Indiana to go see him, the guards let us have contact with our dad. We hadn’t touched our dad for eight years.”

Maribel: “We hugged each other. I kissed him on the cheek, and I went home, crying all the way.”

Norma: “My dad was crying. I’d never seen him cry that way.”

It is considered unlikely that Garza will receive a stay from the Supreme Court or clemency or commutation of his sentence from Bush.