Clinton Gets Praise for Postponement of Killer's Execution
Houston Chronicle

 December 9, 2000

WASHINGTON - Civil rights leaders and lawyers' groups praised President Clinton on Friday for postponing the first federal execution in 37 years, but pressed for a moratorium on all federal death sentences.
 
"It's a good opening hymn, but it's not the sermon," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, chairman of the Black Leadership Forum, a consortium of 26 civil rights organizations and leaders.
 
Thursday evening, Clinton postponed until June 2001 the execution of convicted murderer and marijuana-ring boss Juan Raul Garza to give the Justice Department more time to gather and analyze information about racial and geographic disparities in the federal death penalty system.
 
"If that data is needed to evaluate Garza's case, then it is needed for all death row defendants," Lowery said after he and other members of Citizens for a Moratorium on Federal Executions met for an hour Friday with Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.
 
Lowery and his colleagues, including Julian Bond of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Elizabeth Semel, director of the American Bar Association's death penalty representation project, told Reno and Holder they "would like to see a presidential executive order putting  a moratorium in place," Lowery said. "That would encourage the next president to pursue this study seriously."
 
Justice spokesman Myron Marlin said, "We listened to what they had to say" about a moratorium. "We welcomed their input on how to conduct further review of the federal death penalty system."

Both Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George Bush support the death penalty, but neither has endorsed a moratorium. Whichever of them becomes president could face the issue before next June because another federal inmate, convicted murderer David Paul Hammer, faces execution Feb. 21 unless he files a planned appeal. And other defendants could have execution dates set before then.
 
Of the 19 men under death sentence at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., only four are white; the rest are minorities.  A Justice Department study released in September found that nine of 94 U.S. attorney offices accounted for 43 percent of defendants
recommended for the death penalty and that 40 U.S. attorney offices had never recommended a death penalty.  The study found that minority defendants accounted for 80 percent of both the cases reviewed by top Justice officials for a possible death penalty and of the cases in which a death sentence was imposed. Reno then ordered more study to see if bias earlier in the criminal justice system had inflated the number of minority cases considered for a death penalty request.
 
The study will not be finished before the Clinton administration leaves office.
 
 
 
 

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