June 19, 2001 Posted: 2:05 p.m. EDT (1805 GMT) - From cnn.com
http://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/06/19/garza.execution/
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Second federal inmate executed in Indiana
June 19, 2001 Posted: 2:05 p.m. EDT (1805 GMT) - From cnn.com
http://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/06/19/garza.execution/
TERRE HAUTE, Indiana (CNN) --
Convicted murderer Juan Raul
Garza was executed Tuesday by
lethal injection at the federal prison
in Terre Haute, Indiana, eight days
after the execution of convicted
Oklahoma City bomber Timothy
McVeigh.
Garza was pronounced dead at 7:09
a.m. local time (8:09 a.m. EDT)
Garza showed very little emotion and
seemed ready to die, according to
several media witnesses. They said he
apologized and asked for forgiveness in
his final statement before the execution
began.
Media witness Karen Hensel said Garza made a final statement before his
execution. "He said 'I want to say that I'm sorry. I apologize for all
the pain and
grief that I caused. I ask for your forgiveness and God bless,' " Hensel
said. "At
that point he did somewhat of a sigh, like it's over."
Added Karen Grunden, another media observer: "There was not really a point
at
any time where you could actually say he died. There was no final breath
that
we noticed at all."
Garza's and McVeigh's deaths are the only two
federal executions since 1963.
Prison spokesman Jim Cross said Garza had
spent the last few hours watching television,
talking with staff, seeing the prison chaplain, and
speaking to his spiritual adviser. Cross would not
release the name of the witnesses Garza asked to
watch his execution.
The White House Monday night announced that
President Bush had denied Garza's petition for
clemency, which argued that the federal death
penalty is biased against minorities. Garza is
Hispanic.
"The president found no grounds to grant
clemency in this case," said White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer. Garza's attorneys, who
were rebuffed by the Supreme Court twice
Monday, were informed of Bush's decision after
deciding not to pursue additional appeals.
Garza, 44, a confessed drug trafficker, was
sentenced to death in August, 1993 in Texas for
murdering or ordering the murders of three other
drug traffickers in an attempt to gain control of
distribution networks. He was sentenced to death
for each of the murders under a federal "drug
kingpin" statute.
The U.S. Supreme Court, without comment,
rejected two petitions by Garza Monday. The
first argued that his sentencing jury had not been
adequately instructed on the alternative of life in
prison without parole, and the second maintained
that human rights provisions of an international
agreement had been violated.
Garza was born in Brownsville, Texas, the son
of Hispanic migrant workers. He has two
children ages 9 and 12, and had ratcheted up his
pleas for leniency as the execution date neared.
Last year, he received two stays from President
Clinton, including one in December just days
before his scheduled execution, delaying it for
six months to allow federal authorities to review
the case.
The Bush administration had given many signals
that it would not approve the clemency request,
which argued that the federal death penalty is
biased against minorities.
In a statement, Attorney General John Ashcroft
said there is no reason to spare Garza's life. He
said Garza was responsible for the three deaths
and five others -- including at least four murders
in Mexico for which he was never prosecuted.
Ashcroft also said there was no racial bias in the
case, emphasizing the prosecutor was Hispanic, as were seven of the eight
victims. The Department of Justice, as well, said a recently completed
study
found no racial bias in the federal system.
Garza's attorney John Howley strongly disagreed, saying "there's no question
that race plays a big part in every death sentence."
"The fact is we only give out the death penalty in this country to poor,
to
minorities, and to the mentally retarded," he said.
Witness describes Garza execution
June 19, 2001 Posted: 1:31 PM EDT (1731 GMT) from cnn.com
http://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/06/19/garza.witness/index.html
TERRE HAUTE, Indiana (CNN) --
Journalist Karen Grunden from the
Tribune-Star newspaper in Terre
Haute, Indiana, was one of the
media representatives who
witnessed Juan Raul Garza's
execution Tuesday. At a news
conference afterwards, she
described the execution:
"When we walked into the media
witness room, the curtains were
closed. There are two windows in that
room, and a metal bar that comes out
from the window area that prevents us
from getting up right close to the
window. It was a bluish green curtain.
It opened at approximately 7:00 a.m.
today. We saw Mr. Garza on the
gurney. He had a white sheet draped on him, draped down to the floor, to
about
here. And there was a white sheet on the gurney underneath him, as well.
You
could see that he was wearing a white T-shirt.
"The warden did walk by our window right after the curtain had opened.
And
Mr. Garza seemed to look at someone, possibly, in this inmate witness room
and give a nod before the drugs were administered, before he gave his final
statement. He did look around a little bit, seemed to look at each of the
rooms a
bit, just to kind of gauge who was there, and was given his opportunity
to make
the final statement. You've already heard that.
"The sentencing information was read by Warden
Lappin, and it was three counts of intentional
killing in a criminal conspiracy, I believe --
something to that effect.
"His hair was graying a bit. He did blink a few
times, and this was after the first drug,
apparently, had already started. He looked again at
the inmate witness room, and as he laid there, his
eyes, at the end, did look towards the ceiling, but his head was tilted
toward that
inmate witness room so that he could kind of look in there.
"He did swallow. His eyes became drowsy. There was not really a point at
any
time where you could actually say he died. There was no final breath that
we
noticed at all. Someone had said that his feet had moved. His eyes were
still
open, but his left eye seemed to droop more closed than the other one.
The time of death, as has been said, was 7:09."
TERRE HAUTE, Indiana (AP)
- Convicted murderer and drug kingpin Juan
Raul Garza was executed
Tuesday morning, eight days after Timothy
McVeigh became the first
federal inmate put to death since 1963.
Garza died at 7:09 a.m. by
lethal injection, strapped to the same gurney
where McVeigh was executed
last week.
The scene at the prison was
in stark contrast to the buzz of media
activity that met McVeigh's
final days. Dan Dunne, a U.S. Bureau of
Prisons spokesman, said
only about 75 reporters had registered for
credentials to cover Garza's
death. More than 1,000 reporters had
credentials for the McVeigh
execution.
Garza was the first person
to be executed under the 1998 Anti-Drug Abuse
Act, which imposes a death
sentence for murderers stemming from a drug
enterprise.
Despite lingering questions
about the racial and geographic equality of
the federal death penalty,
President Bush and the U.S. Supreme Court
refused Monday to delay
Garza's execution.
The Supreme Court rejected
claims that the jury should have been told
that the alternative to
a death sentence was life in prison with no
possibility of release,
and that Garza's death sentence would violate
two international treaties.
Following the two Supreme
Court rulings, Bush turned down a clemency
request by Garza, who was
convicted in Bush's home state of Texas in
1993.
Garza's attorney Audrey Anderson
said she was "outraged" by the
government's refusal to
delay the execution.
"There are significant questions
as to whether Mr. Garza was chosen for
federal capital punishment
on the basis of his ethnicity," Anderson
said. "Questions
that the government thinks should be investigated
further, but doesn't think
are important enough to stop this execution."
Garza, 44, was convicted
of murdering a man by shooting him five times
in the head and neck and
ordering the deaths of two other men. It was
all part of Garza's marijuana
smuggling operation, which federal
prosecutors say he ran ruthlessly.
Death penalty opponents and
some former Justice Department officials
wondered whether Garza,
a Mexican-American born in the United States,
would have been sentenced
to death if he were white or had committed his
crimes elsewhere.
Six of the 19 men on federal
death row were sentenced in Texas. All are
minorities.
"There is a question of whether
the way the system is set up produces
arbitrary and discriminatory
results," said Robert Litt, a former deputy
assistant attorney general
in the Clinton Justice Department.
A Justice Department study
released last year found wide racial and
geographical disparities
in the use of the federal death penalty.
Because of that study, then-President
Clinton delayed Garza's execution
date, saying, "In this area,
there is no room for error."
A Justice Department review
released earlier this month found no
evidence of bias in federal
death penalty sentences. Attorney General
John Ashcroft ordered further
study but said Monday there was no
evidence of racial bias
in Garza's death sentence and no reason to delay
his execution any further.
The original Justice Department
study showed that 80 percent of federal
defendants charged with
capital offenses over a five-year period were
minorities.
The study also found that just 9 of the 94 U.S. attorney
districts accounted for
about 43 percent of all cases in which
prosecutors sought the death
penalty.
Garza's attorney cited 26
cases involving similar crimes to Garza's
where prosecutors did not
seek the federal death penalty.
Garza spent Monday resting,
reading, watching television and visiting
with his attorneys, said
Jim Cross, executive assistant at the prison.
Garza also met with the
warden, who explained what the inmate could
expect in the coming hours.
His final requested meal
consisted of steak, french fries, onion rings,
diet cola, and three slices
of bread.
Early Tuesday, death penalty
opponents arrived together on a bus with a
police escort.
Some carried signs, some began praying. One man sat
by himself in a field about
600 yards from the prison and lit a candle.
Dwight Conquerwood of Chicago
said, "It's a personal outrage. I'm
appalled and aghast.
Judicial killing is theatre. It's planned, it's
staged and it's deliberate."
WASHINGTON (AP) - President
Bush (news - web sites) was
notified Tuesday that
drug kingpin Juan Raul Garza was dead, the
second federal execution
of his tenure.
Bush rejected Garza'
clemency request Monday, the first request he has
received from a federal
death-row inmate.
White House spokesman
Ari Fleischer (news - web sites) said Bush
was notified at 8:10
a.m. EDT, about one minute after the official time of
death.
The Supreme Court twice
refused on Monday to postpone the
execution and twice
refused to hear the merits of Garza's appeals,
placing the case in
Bush's hands.
White House counsel
Al Gonzales informed Garza's lawyers that Bush
saw no reason to block
the execution.
Bush, who allowed 152
executions to proceed while he was governor
of Texas, was convinced
that Garza was guilty and had full access to the
courts, Fleischer
said earlier.
Last year, President
Clinton (news - web sites) twice delayed the
execution of Garza,
each time within a week of the scheduled date.
Clinton sought a Justice
Department (news - web sites) review of why
some regions impose
the death penalty more than others as he
considered his decision.
In his appeals Monday,
Garza contended that the jury should have been
told that the alternative
to a death sentence was life in prison without the
possibility of release,
and claimed that his death sentence violates two
international treaties.
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) -- At the same prison where
Timothy McVeigh awaits his fate is a lesser-known figure
who faces execution June 19 in a case that could have a
far greater effect on the future of the federal death penalty.
Juan Raul Garza, 44, was convicted of running a marijuana
smuggling operation, killing a man and ordering the
slayings of two others he thought were informants.
The Texas drug kingpin narrowly escaped the death
chamber in December amid concerns that the federal
death penalty is racially or geographically biased.
President Clinton ordered the Justice Department to review
the government's use of capital punishment.
Now, just weeks away from Garza's lethal injection, there
has been no word from the department, and officials there
will not comment on whether the review will be completed
in time.
McVeigh's execution for the Oklahoma City bombing is set
for June 11, though his attorneys are seeking a stay based
on newly revealed FBI documents withheld during the trial.
If McVeigh's execution is delayed, Garza would be the first
federal prisoner put to death since 1963.
Garza's attorneys have filed a plea for clemency, citing
cases involving similar crimes, including the murder case
of a mob hit man in New York, where federal prosecutors
never pursued the death penalty.
"I think what we're hoping we can accomplish with Juan
Garza's case is to just somehow be heard above all of this
sound and fury and white noise that's surrounding the
McVeigh case," defense attorney Gregory Wiercioch said.
"That case is really overshadowing some serious systemic
problems with the federal death penalty system."
Among those problems, Wiercioch and other death penalty
opponents say, is Garza's ethnicity: Garza, who is
Hispanic, is one of 17 minorities out of the 20 men
currently on federal death row.
Another factor is that Garza was sentenced to death in
Texas, which has sent more men to federal death row than
any other state. Texas and Virginia alone account for half
the 20 inmates on federal death row, leading critics to say
capital punishment is not sought consistently from state to
state.
Garza's attorneys have cited 27 cases involving crimes
similar to Garza's in which the federal death penalty was
not sought or a plea bargain was accepted.
"It's not a case where he's claiming innocence on the
underlying evidence," said Bruce Gilchrist, another of
Garza's attorneys. "At the same time, there's every reason
to believe that if he wasn't Hispanic and hadn't committed
his crimes in Texas, but was from a white crime family in
New York or New Jersey, he wouldn't be on death row
today."
A Justice Department study released last year showed
that between 1995 and July 2000, nine of the 94 U.S.
attorney districts accounted for nearly half the 183
defendants recommended for the death penalty. They were
Puerto Rico, the eastern district of Virginia, Maryland, the
eastern and southern districts of New York, western
Missouri, New Mexico, western Tennessee and northern
Texas. Forty districts never recommended the death
penalty.
Robert Litt, a former deputy assistant attorney general in
the Clinton Justice Department, said there is "a question of
whether the way the system is set up produces arbitrary
and discriminatory results."
"I don't understand what the rush is to execute somebody
before you get answers to these questions," said Litt, who
is now part of the group Citizens for a Moratorium on
Federal Executions. "Garza's not going anywhere."
Justice Department officials have refused to comment on
allegations that Garza's case has been shaped by race or
geography.
The son of migrant farm workers, Garza set up a marijuana
ring in the Texas border city of Brownsville in the early
1980s. Through 1992, Garza's operation moved tons of pot
from Mexico into the United States.
Prosecutors characterized him as a ruthless man who
considered murder a way of doing business. When one
employee crossed Garza, he was driven onto a farm road,
where Garza shot him in the back of the head, dumped his
body in the brush, then shot him four more times.
"He's about as violent as anybody I've seen," said Mark
Patterson, the chief federal prosecutor at Garza's trial.
Presiding U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela said he does
not accept claims of racial bias in Garza's case. "In this
particular case, the judge was Hispanic, the defendant was
Hispanic, a majority of the jurors were Hispanic and the
victims were Hispanic," he said.
Garza was one of the first people convicted under the
newly reinstated federal death penalty in 1988.
Prosecutors were given narrow guidelines under which they
could seek the death penalty against drug kingpins
convicted of murder.
"I think the government was looking for someone that they
thought would fit the bill," said Philip Hilder, Garza's
attorney during his trial. "I think they accentuated Juan's
activities and his stature in order for them to fit this profile
that they had."
Federal death row inmate
Juan Raul Garza is due to be executed at the US Penitentiary in Terre Haute,
Indiana, on 19 June 2001, despite serious concern about evidence introduced
at his 1993 trial,
continuing concern about
racial and geographic disparities in federal death sentencing, and a degrees38-year
de facto moratorium on federal executions.
Juan Garza was tried for
the killings of three men in Texas in the course of a marijuana trafficking
enterprise based in Brownsville on the Mexican border. Arguing for the
death penalty at the sentencing
phase of the trial, the
government introduced evidence that Juan Garza had committed four other
unsolved murders in Mexico. There was no physical evidence linking Garza
to these crimes, for which he
has never been prosecuted
or convicted. Instead, the prosecution relied on the testimony of three
accomplices in the Brownsville drug ring who were alleged to have either
committed or participated in the
Texas murders, but who were
offered reduced sentences in return for their testimony. Juan Garza's jury
voted to sentence him to death despite finding in mitigation that 'another
defendant or defendants,
equally culpable in the
crime, will not be punished by death'.
The Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights (IACHR) issued its findings on the case on 4 April 2001.
Stressing the need for adherence to stringent safeguards in capital cases,
the Commission
concluded that Juan Garza
was not only convicted and sentenced for the three Texas murders, but also
for the four Mexico murders 'without having been properly and fairly charged
and tried for these
additional crimes'.
The IACHR found that the introduction of the evidence of the four Mexico
murders was 'antithetical to the most basic and fundamental judicial guarantees'.
It concluded that Juan
Garza had been sentenced
to death 'in an arbitrary and capricious manner' and that his execution
would be a 'deliberate and egregious violation' of the American Declaration
of the Rights and Duties of
Man. It called on the USA
to provide 'an effective remedy, which includes commutation of sentence'
and to review its capital laws, procedures and practices to ensure compliance
with international
standards, including by
prohibiting the introduction of evidence of unadjudicated crimes at the
sentencing phase of capital trials.
This is Juan Garza's third
execution date in less than a year. President Clinton twice issued stays.
The first reprieve came because federal clemency guidelines were not yet
ready (see update to UA
40/00, 3 August 2000), and
the second to 'allow the Justice Department time to gather and properly
analyse more information' after it had released statistics showing marked
racial and geographic
disparities in the application
of the federal death penalty. (see update to EXTRA 85/00, 11 December 2000).
The Justice Department's
statistics are of direct relevance to Juan Garza's case, given his ethnic
origin and the fact that he was prosecuted in Texas, one of the handful
of states accounting for the vast majority of cases in which federal prosecutors
have sought the death penalty. The statistics suggest that the same
crime committed by a different person in a different state may have resulted
in a
sentence of less than death.
There are numerous examples in which the death penalty was not sought against
federal defendants accused of killing several victims in drug-related murders.
The onus is on the government
to prove that neither bias nor discrimination plays any role in federal
capital justice. Yet with Juan Garza less than a month from execution,
the Justice Department has
not released any further
analysis. There are indications that the Department may release further
information a matter of days before Juan Garza's execution.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Juan Garza is one of two
federal inmates scheduled for execution. The other is Timothy
McVeigh, who is currently considering whether to resume appeals following
revelations that the FBI withheld
evidence in his case (see
update to EXTRA 25/01, 22 May 2001). While there have been 713 state-level
executions in the USA since it resumed judicial killing in 1977, there
have been no executions of
federal prisoners since
1963.
As the USA prepares to end a 38-year de facto moratorium on federal executions, much of the rest of the world has turned against this cruel and irrevocable punishment, with 108 countries abolitionist in law or practice. This is also a time of unprecedented domestic concern about the reliability and fairness of US capital justice in light of overwhelming evidence that its hallmarks are discrimination, arbitrariness and error.
This is an issue crying out
for leadership at the highest level. Amnesty International has been calling
on President Bush, who promised at his inauguration to be a leader who
would 'speak for greater justice and compassion', to announce a moratorium
on federal executions as a first step towards leading his country away
from this failed and outdated policy.
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