RIGHTS-US: Another Execution, Another Controversy

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 20 2001 (IPS) - In its second execution in ten days, the administration of President George W. Bush put to death convicted murderer Juan Raul Garza Tuesday despite claims by lawyers and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that he did not receive a fair trial.

Garza, a Mexican-American, was killed by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana, in the same prison and by the same method as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was put to death last Monday.

The two executions were the federal government’s first in 38 years. Another 18 federal prisoners await execution, a fraction of the 3,800 on death row in state prisons.

Amnesty International denounced Garza’s execution, saying it “further damaged the USA’s international reputation and given its citizens less reason to feel confident in the administration of justice in the country.” The London-based group is campaigning to abolish the death penalty worldwide.

The substantial majority of US citizens that has long supported the death penalty has diminished over the past 18 months, according to recent opinion polls. Two of the 38 US states using the death penalty have declared a moratorium on executions.

About two-thirds of the electorate now opposes the death penalty for mentally retarded defendants, according to the polls. Just last week, Bush’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, signed a new law banning the death penalty for the mentally retarded, making his state the 16th to outlaw it for defendants whose IQ scores fell below 70.

The legislature in Texas, which executed several mentally retarded defendants when Bush was governor, passed a similar law last week but Bush’s successor, Rick Perry, vetoed it. The US Supreme Court is expected to decide later this year whether the practice violates the federal constitution.

Along with Kyrgyzstan and Japan, the United States is the only country where the mentally retarded can be executed, a fact that has become a source of embarrassment to US diplomats abroad.

Nine recently retired senior foreign service officers have signed a brief in one pending case arguing that executing the mentally retarded defendant, Ernest McCarver “will strain diplomatic relations with close American allies, provide diplomatic ammunition to countries with demonstrably worse human rights records, increase US diplomatic isolation, and impair other United States foreign policy interests.”

Garza was not mentally retarded, nor did he deny committing the acts for which he was sentenced to death in 1993: killing an associate and ordering two others slain. His lawyers, however, assailed the sentence on several procedural grounds and the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) decried it as obtained in an “arbitrary and capricious manner.”

During the sentencing phase of Garza’s trial, the prosecution, without providing any evidence, told the jury that Garza, the head of a marijuana-smuggling ring, was believed to have killed five other people.

The jury was not told it had the option of sentencing Garza to life imprisonment without any possibility of release. “Jurors who are not allowed to impose a true life sentence are more likely to vote for death,” according to James Orenstein, a lawyer who participated in a recent Justice Department study of the death penalty. “On the other hand, jurors who know that they can effectively keep a defendant in prison for life are less likely to choose death.”

Congress recognised these tendencies when it passed a new law in 1994 requiring that juries in capital cases be told they can impose a real life sentence – but that was one year after Garza was put on death row.

The most important basis for challenging the sentence, however, was the same one that persuaded former President Bill Clinton to stay the execution last December, five days before Garza was originally scheduled to die.

The Justice Department found in a study last September that 70 percent of federal death penalty defendants were Latino or African American and that nearly half of all such cases were pursued in just a few states, including Texas. Clinton said he wanted to give the Department more time to study “racial and geographic disparities in the federal system” before proceeding with the execution.

John Ashcroft, the current attorney-general, has pre-empted those follow-up studies by announcing the results of a study which, he insisted, showed there was no racial or other bias in federal death-penalty cases because the kinds of crimes which federal law made punishable by death – mainly drug-related killings – were precisely those in which minorities were disproportionately represented. On the eve of Garza’s execution, Ashcroft said he could find “no evidence of racial bias in the sentence.”

This provoked accusations from lawyers and commentators, that Ashcroft was playing politics with the statistics. Ashcroft, they noted, had said that federal prosecutors had sought capital punishment against 38 percent of white defendants between 1995 and 2000 – but that he ignored the comparable statistic for non-white defendants: 80 percent.