Clinton Stays Execution
The Associated PressNewsday
December 8, 2000Washington-President Bill Clinton yesterday postponed for at least six months what would have been the first execution of a federal inmate in 37 years, leaving the fate of convicted murderer Juan Raul Garza for the next president to decide.
In deciding to stay Garza's execution until June, 2001, Clinton said he wanted to give the Justice Department more time to gather and properly analyze information about racial and geographic disparities in the federal death penalty system. "In issuing the stay, I have not decided that the death penalty should not be imposed in this case, in which heinous crimes were proved," Clinton said in a statement. "Nor have I decided to halt all executions in the federal system." Clinton concluded that examining the possible racial and regional bias should be completed before the United States moves forward. "In this area, there is no room for error," Clinton said.
The president has received a flurry of requests from here and abroad to spare Garza, a 44-year-old marijuana-ring boss convicted in Texas of three murders in 1990 and 1991. French President Jacques Chirac appealed in his role as president of the European Union, whose members generally oppose capital punishment. Pope John Paul II also sent a letter.
Garza, a Hispanic from Brownsville, Texas, asked Clinton in September to commute his sentence to life in prison because of "long-standing racial bias" in capital punishment sentencing. Of the 19 men under death sentence at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., four are white; the rest are minorities.
The president had unlimited power to act in the Garza case: He could have commuted the sentence to life in prison, issued a moratorium on all federal death sentences or refrained from acting at all, allowing the lethal injection to proceed as scheduled on Tuesday.
"Whether one supports the death penalty or opposes it, there should be no question that the gravity and finality of the penalty demand that we be certain that when it is imposed, it is imposed fairly," Clinton said. Clinton asked Attorney General Janet Reno to report to his successor by the end of April, 2001, on the fairness of the federal death penalty. The death penalty is supported by both Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who has overseen more than 100 executions in his home state.
A previous Justice Department study found racial and geographic disparities in federal death sentences, which Garza's lawyers cited in a bid for clemency.
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