Pubdate: Wed, 13 Jun 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: National
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: David Johnston

LAWYERS TRYING TO STOP EXECUTION CITE FLAWS IN BIAS REPORT

WASHINGTON, June 12 -- Lawyers for Juan Raul Garza, who is scheduled to be 
executed on Tuesday, filed a petition today with the Justice Department 
criticizing Attorney General John Ashcroft's conclusion in a study last 
week that federal death sentences have been imposed without racial or 
ethnic bias.

The lawyers said that Mr. Garza, who is Mexican-American, should not be 
executed because of what they described as serious questions about the 
study. They said that the report relied on incomplete and misleading data 
to conclude that there was no evidence of racial bias even though only two 
of the 20 people on federal death row, after the execution Monday of 
Timothy J. McVeigh, are white.

The filing today was submitted to the Justice Department as a supplement to 
the clemency petition that Mr. Garza's lawyers have sent President Bush, 
asking him to commute Mr. Garza's sentence from death to life in prison. 
Mr. Garza was convicted in 1993 of three drug-related murders in Texas and 
in recent months a group of religious, civil rights and political leaders 
have asked Mr. Bush to declare a moratorium on death sentences, citing Mr. 
Garza's case.

Today, the lawyers said in their legal papers that the Ashcroft study 
resorted to statistically unsupported racial stereotyping to conclude that 
there was a disproportionate number of minorities on federal death row 
mainly because of the government's emphasis on enforcement of drug 
trafficking laws.

The Ashcroft study, released on June 6, concluded that, "In areas where 
large scale organized drug trafficking is largely carried out by gangs 
whose membership is drawn from minority groups, the active federal role in 
investigating and prosecuting these crimes results in a high proportion of 
minority defendants in federal cases, including a high proportion of 
minority defendants in potential capital cases arising from the lethal 
violence associated with the drug trade."

Mr. Garza's lawyers said that the Ashcroft study failed to examine 
potential death penalty cases in which prosecutors might have pursued 
capital punishment but opted not to do so. "We're missing a central piece 
of the puzzle," said Audrey J. Anderson, a lawyer for Mr. Garza. "How are 
these cases getting into the system in the first place? Is there some kind 
of racial unfairness at the front end in identifying which cases to pursue?"

The Bush administration has given no indication that it would delay the 
execution of Mr. Garza, which is scheduled to take place on Tuesday morning 
at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., where Mr. McVeigh was put to death.

Mr. Garza, the son of migrant farm workers, was the head of a 
drug-trafficking ring that smuggled in tons of marijuana from Mexico, 
according to the federal charges against him.

He was convicted of ordering the execution of three people as part of his 
criminal enterprise.

Mr. Garza has said that he was not responsible for the murders, but his 
lawyers, in seeking clemency, have not argued that he is innocent. Instead, 
they have argued that it was wrong to execute Mr. Garza because the federal 
death penalty, as it is currently administered, discriminates against 
minorities and is unevenly applied across the states.

Support for a death penalty moratorium has gained momentum in part because 
of an initial Justice Department study last year which found substantial 
racial and geographic disparities in federal death sentences.

The study found that in nearly 80 percent of the cases in which prosecutors 
sought the death penalty, the defendant was a member of a minority group 
and nearly 40 percent of death penalty cases originated in nine of the states.
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