Tuesday, 19 June, 2001

US minorities crowd death row

Federal prisoners are executed at Terre Haute

By BBC News Online's Kate Milner

Convicted murderer and drug smuggler Juan Raul Garza is the second person to be executed by the US federal government since 1963 - and just eight days after Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Most death sentences are carried out at state level, but certain crimes like terrorism or murders carried out during large-scale drug trafficking, fall under federal jurisdiction.

While McVeigh's crime and punishment received intense publicity in the US and around the world, anti-death penalty campaigners say Garza's execution is more significant in that his crimes and ethnicity are more typical of the sort of person the US consigns to death row.

Of the 19 prisoners awaiting the federal death penalty at Terre Haute, Indiana, 17 are from minority groups.

Racial debate

Garza, a Mexican-American from Brownsville, Texas, admitted killing one person and ordering the murder of two others - his guilt was not in doubt.

But he claimed his death sentence was the result of a racially and ethnically biased justice system.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said Garza's sentence was not discriminatory, noting that the judge and prosecutor in his case were Hispanic, as were most of the jurors.

"There is no evidence of racial bias in the sentence Mr Garza received," he said.

But according to Amnesty International, race does play a prominent role in who lives and who dies.

Death sentences are more likely when the defendant is black, and especially if the victim is white, say campaigners.

"Had Garza not been Mexican-American, it's quite unlikely that he would have been given the death sentence," said Neil Durkin of Amnesty International UK.

"In general, white organised criminals are not ending up on death row."

Of the 624 people executed between 1977 and April 2000, more than 82% were convicted of the murder of a white person - even though the number of blacks and whites murdered each year was almost equal, says Amnesty.

Former President Bill Clinton delayed Garza's original execution date after a Justice Department review found wide racial and geographical disparities in the use of the federal death penalty.

For example, six of the prisoners in Terre Haute were sentenced in Texas, where President George Bush used to be governor.

A short Justice Department review released this month found no evidence of bias in federal death penalty sentences, but Mr Ashcroft has ordered further study.

To Amnesty International, that position is hard to understand.

"There's a worrying gung-ho mentality coming out of the justice system," said Mr Durkin. "We are really concerned that fairness is being sacrificed for finality.

Texas record

As well as sending a disproportionate number of people to federal death row, Texas also oversees more executions than any other state, despite accounting for less than 8% of the nation's population.

According to Amnesty, Texas has carried out more than a third of the country's executions since 1977.

Last year's Justice Department review found that prosecutors were twice as likely to press for a capital sentence for black and Hispanic defendants.

And Garza's lawyers cited 26 cases involving crimes similar to Garza's where prosecutors did not seek the federal death penalty.

Last June, Texas's criminal justice department's chief criminal psychologist was quoted as saying that ethnicity "was a fact weighing in favour of future dangerousness."

"There is a question of whether the way the system is set up produces arbitrary and discriminatory results," said Robert Litt, a former deputy assistant US attorney general. "I think somebody ought to get some answers and understand what's going on."