Condemned Murderer Seeks Commutation

A Texas man on Monday asked President Bush to commute his death sentence to life without the possibility of parole, maintaining that questions remain about the fairness of the federal death penalty system. The case could mark the first time that Bush has to make a decision on the death penalty since becoming president.

Juan Raul Garza, 44, was convicted of three drug-related murders in 1993. He is set to be executed June 19, just eight days after the scheduled lethal injection of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh. A federal death sentence has not been carried out since 1963.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft postponed McVeigh’s execution earlier this month after learning that the FBI had failed to turn over some 3,100 pages of investigative documents. Garza’s attorneys now are attempting to use that controversy to their client’s benefit. In a May 14 letter, Garza’s trial attorney, Douglas C. McNabb, called on federal authorities to review their files and “promptly turn over to the defense any evidence they have that was not turned over to the defense in the original case.”

During Bush’s tenure as Texas governor, there were 152 executions, and the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles granted clemency only one time. Under Texas law, the governor does not have the sole authority to grant clemency--a distinct contrast to the power Bush has as president.

President Clinton on Dec. 7 granted Garza a six-month reprieve--just five days before he was to be executed--in order to give the Justice Department time to examine “racial and geographic disparities in the federal death penalty system.”

A Justice Department study released in September showed that 70% of federal death penalty defendants are either Latino or black, and that fewer than one-third of the states--including Texas--are responsible for more than half of the federal cases in which the death penalty is sought. “The gravity and finality of the penalty demand that we be certain that when it is imposed, it is imposed fairly,” Clinton said.

Clinton called on the Justice Department to complete a review of the federal death penalty system by the end of April, before any federal execution went forward.

That study is still underway. By the time of Garza’s scheduled execution, however, the Justice Department expects to issue its review of the federal death penalty system, including what steps could be taken to further analyze racial disparities, spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said. She added that the review has been delayed by last-minute complications surrounding McVeigh’s scheduled execution.

During his confirmation hearings, Ashcroft stated that evidence of racial disparities in the use of the federal death penalty “troubles me deeply.”

Ashcroft said that although he did not favor a moratorium on federal executions, he supported the Justice Department study. He also said that “the fair, just and sure administration of the federal death penalty requires that it be applied completely free of racial bias.”

Failure to complete the study is reason enough for a reprieve, Garza’s lawyers said in papers filed Monday.

“The same disparities and concerns . . . that provided the basis for a reprieve for Mr. Garza in December 2000 exist, unameliorated today. It would be unconscionable to execute Mr. Garza now, when grave doubts exist as to whether or not his ethnicity and state of prosecution [Texas] played a role in the government’s decision to seek the death penalty in his case,” attorneys Gregory W. Wiercioch and Bruce W. Gilchrist wrote.

Wiercioch said that as a Latino in Texas, Garza stood a far greater chance of being put to death than do white murder defendants in many other states.

“If Timothy McVeigh is supposedly the poster child for everything that’s right with the federal death penalty system, Juan Garza is the poster child for everything that’s wrong with it--the racial disparities and geographic disparities,” Wiercioch said in an interview.

Of the 21 men on federal death row in Terre Haute, Ind., just three--including McVeigh--are white.

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

But in an attempt to illustrate a lack of consistency in Justice Department policy, the clemency papers filed Monday included a list of 27 instances in which defendants were convicted of killing three or more people and the department either did not seek the death penalty or accepted a plea bargain.

Those cases were filed in federal jurisdictions around the country, including one in Los Angeles, three in Detroit, three in Washington, D.C., four in Manhattan and seven in Brooklyn, N.Y. In three cases, the defendants were white and involved in organized crime-related drug murders, according to the papers. None were from Texas.

“These multiple murder cases are not automatic death penalty prosecutions,” Wiercioch said. “When they are not automatic, you have to start looking at what other factors make a difference. The difference between Juan Garza and some of these other defendants is that he is from Texas and he is Latino.”

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Weinstein reported from Los Angeles and Lichtblau from Washington.