US authorities executed Mexican-American convicted murderer Juan Raul Garza here Tuesday, overriding objections that he was victimised by an ethnically-biased federal death penalty system.

Officials at the federal penitentiary administered a lethal injection to Garza at dawn, pronouncing the 44-year-old dead at 7:09 (1209 GMT), according to warden Harley Lappin.

The drug trafficker -- who had pleaded for his life in a videotape submitted
to President George W. Bush -- went to his death apologising for his crimes.
"I just want to say that I am sorry and I apologise for all the pain and grief that I have caused. I ask for your forgiveness and God bless," Garza said.

None of Garza's four children, most of whom spent the past fortnight in Indiana, were present in the execution chamber to witness his death. They plan to hold a private burial for him in Brownsville, Texas, at a later date, relatives said earlier.

Houston attorney Greg Wiercioch, who represented Garza for five of the eight
years he was on death row, condemned US authorities for proceeding with the execution in light of continuing doubts about the equity of the federal capital punishment system.  "I think it's unconscionable that the federal government would carry out an execution while at the same time conducting further studies to determine whether there is racial discrimination in the use of the federal death penalty," said Wiercioch.

Wiercioch and his legal team had argued that Garza's case clearly demonstrated what they said was an ethnic bias in the way the federal death penalty is meted out.  Had Garza not been Latino and had he been prosecuted somewhere other than Texas, he might have been able to plea bargain his sentence down to life in prison, they argued.

The federal death penalty has been heavily criticised for its alleged ethnic
or racial bias: seventeen of the 19 inmates on federal death row here are minorities.

The Clinton administration delayed Garza's execution for six months in December of last year following a Department of Justice review which showed that almost 80 percent of cases where federal prosecutors sought the death penalty involved minority defendants.

But attorney general John Ashcroft insisted that justice was done in Garza's case, although he has instructed the National Institute for Justice, (the Justice Department's research and development agency), to launch an independent study of how capital cases end up in the federal system.

On Monday Garza's attorneys exhausted all their legal options after the US Supreme Court refused to hear two appeals and President George W. Bush denied a request for clemency.

"I don't know how to answer when I am asked about the families devastated by Juan Garza's crimes. But I do know that this isn't the answer, and I do know that justice doesn't demand death," Wiercioch said following his client's
death.

A moratorium pressure group said the execution was "indefensible."

"At a minimum, Mr. Garza's execution should have been delayed to permit the full investigation of the troubling evidence that mars the federal death  penalty process, which Attorney General Ashcroft has now indicated he will undertake," Citizens for a Moratorium on Federal Execution said in a statement.

Although Garza's execution came just over a week after that of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and was only the second execution by federal authorities in almost 40 years, there was none of the media attention that marked that occasion.

Only a handful of journalists signed up to cover the event, compared to the hundreds who came here to cover McVeigh's last days, according to prison officials.

The Texan, who was sentenced to die in 1993 for murdering one man and ordering hits on two others linked to a Brownsville marijuana drug ring, enjoyed none of the notoriety that attended McVeigh, who killed 168 people in the worst act of terrorism ever seen on US soil.

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