June 4, 2001

Group Seeks Moratorium on Federal Executions

Bush Administration Accused of Stalling Study on Racial Bias as Date Nears fo
r Inmate Garza
By William Claiborne
Washington Post Staff Writer

CHICAGO, June 3 -- With slightly more than two weeks left before the scheduled execution of convicted murderer and drug kingpin Juan Raul Garza, death penalty opponents today accused the Bush administration of stalling a government study of racial and geographic disparities in capital punishment procedures.

The Washington-based Citizens for a Moratorium on Federal Executions said the delayed study by independent experts and the FBI's failure to provide Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh more than 4,000 pages of documents prior to trial raise doubts about the fairness and reliability of the federal death penalty system.

In a letter to President Bush scheduled for release at a news conference Monday in Washington, the group contended the federal government should impose a moratorium on executions until it is certain there is no bias in the sentencing process. The group said Garza's case illustrates the racial disparities on federal death row, where 70 percent of the 20 inmates are minorities and where most were convicted in a few conservative states.

Garza is awaiting execution June 19 at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. He would become the first person put to death by the federal government since 1963 if McVeigh's scheduled June 11 execution is postponed. McVeigh last week filed court papers seeking a stay of execution so his attorneys can determine whether the new FBI documents would have had any impact on his conviction and death sentence.

Garza, 44, an admitted marijuana trafficker, was convicted of committing one murder and ordering two others in 1990 and 1991. During the sentencing phase of the trial, the prosecution linked him to five additional murders, four of them in Mexico. Garza has asked Bush to commute his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In that appeal, his lawyers cited the need for further study of racial disparities in sentencing.

They also said Garza's jury was not instructed by the judge that Garza would be automatically sentenced to life in prison without parole if he were not given the death penalty. They contended that he is the only federal death row inmate whose jury did not receive that information.

In its letter to Bush, the moratorium committee noted that a Justice Department review of capital punishment sentencing disparities released in September prompted then-President Bill Clinton to grant Garza a reprieve until additional study of racial and geographical factors could be conducted.

The initial Justice Department examination showed that 16 of the federal inmates condemned as of last July were black, Hispanic or a member of another racial minority, and that minorities accounted for about 74 percent of the defendants prosecuted for capital crimes over the last five years.

The letter's signatories include Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; singer Harry Belafonte; Norman Lear, director of People for the American Way; Sister Helen Prejean, author of "Dead Man Walking"; and Cardinal Roger Mahony, Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles.

One of the moratorium petitioners, Robert S. Litt, principal associate deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, said: "There is some information out there that is suggestive and troubling. . . . There may or may not be unfairness, but you don't know until you study it."

The letter says Clinton called on Justice to finish an expanded internal study of the death penalty system by the end of April of this year -- a month and a half before Garza's new execution date. Former attorney general Janet Reno later authorized the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department's research arm, to conduct a third study of disparities, using independent experts. Moratorium proponents say that review has been stalled.

The moratorium petitioners said that during his Senate confirmation hearing, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft testified that evidence of racial disparities in the application of the death penalty "troubles me deeply," and that he approved of a thorough study of the system.

"There has been no indication that the [Justice] Department intends to continue the necessary independent investigation of racial and geographic bias in the death penalty," the group said.

Subsequent statements by Ashcroft to members of Congress as recently as last month suggest that even the Justice Department's pending internal inquiry into alleged disparities "will consist of little more than a re-analysis of the same data already examined and found to demonstrate 'troubling' racial and geographic disparities," the group said.

Justice spokeswoman Susan Dryden, declining to comment in detail, said: "We are certainly aware of the death penalty studies that are there and we are very much aware of Mr. Garza's execution date."

Some death penalty experts who were to be involved in the independent study said they believe it either has been put on hold or scuttled.

David Baldus, a University of Iowa law professor who attended a Jan. 10 meeting of experts in Washington that was called by Reno to launch the study, said: "At the time there were expectations it would go forward. . . . But since then nothing much has happened." He said the federal prosecutors attending the meeting "didn't seem very interested in it."

Kevin McNally, a Frankfort, Ky., attorney with the Federal Death Penalty Resource Council Project funded by the Federal Defender Services, said, "My impression is that the independent research initiative is being axed."

"Something should have happened after the January meeting," McNally added, "and nothing has happened. One can conclude that the decision has been made to do nothing."

In a May 21 appeal for clemency for Garza, one of his attorneys, Bruce W. Gilcrest, recounted Ashcroft's commitment to further studies of racial and geographic sentencing disparities and wrote that "it appears that research contemplated by the National Institute of Justice designed to explore the potential causes of these disparities has not even begun." In an interview, Gilcrest said such a study would take 12 to 18 months.

He said the NIJ was supposed to have sought proposals from independent death penalty experts on how to proceed, but there is no evidence that has happened.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

 
 

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