12/06/01

 Lawyers Trying to Stop Execution Cite Flaws in Bias 

Report By DAVID JOHNSTON WASHINGTON, 

 - 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.