AFTER the execution of Timothy McVeigh last week, it looked like the best death penalty opponents could hope for was another 38 years without a federal execution. That hope was dashed earlier this week when Pres. George W. Bush refused to delay the execution of Juan Raul Garza.
Garza, a Hispanic marijuana smuggler, was convicted of three drug related murders in Texas. He was subjected to lethal injection Tuesday morning in the same room that saw McVeigh's death barely a week earlier.
Garza, unlike McVeigh, expressed sorrow for his crimes - he admits to killing one drug associate and ordering the deaths of two others. Also unlike his fellow "death house" inmate, Garza was actively seeking life in prison, rather than the death penalty.
If the death penalty was pointless, but potentially understandable, in McVeigh's case, it was nothing short of cruel in the case of Garza. A federal justice system as inconsistent, from state to state, person to person and from politician to politician, as the United States', can offer no justification for such killings.
Garza, convicted under the Drug Kingpin Act of 1988, was clearly conducting illegal business and his murder of three men certainly is cruel, and he should be punished. But his crime is not on the same scale as McVeigh's bombing, which resulted in 68 deaths.
Although there is a list of federal crimes punishable by death, they range from espionage to terrorism to carjacking. Death is the highest form of penalty and should only be implemented against the most heinious criminals, if at all. Its implementation in cases such as Garza's further depletes the country's already low regard for life.
The justice of Garza's sentencing is called into further question by a study recently completed by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. Ashcroft's study found that, after conviction, minorities were no more likely to face the death penalty than white defendents.
However, the study fails to mention that white criminals are twice as likely to plea bargain on capital offences and that, of federal death row inmates, 70 percent are black and 15 percent are Hispanic, while only fifteen percent are white, according to the Death Penalty Information center ("Garza Turned Down By High Court, Bush, Late Efforts to Block Execution Fail," The Washington Post, June 19).
These numbers would suggest that, even if sentencing is not overtly affected by race, the prosecution of capital crimes is at best uneven and at worst blatantly and unfairly biased against minorities.
Ashcroft, while stating that there is no racial bias in the system, is listening to others who claim the report shows nothing new and has ordered an outside report. It is insensitive and presumptuious to execute a Hispanic inmate in the midst of studies as to the system's racial fairness.
Beyond Gonza's case, and beyond federal executions, state execution policies are so inconsistent that they too imply that the system is inherently uneven and judicially questionable. Nineteen states do not even allow the death penalty. Of those that do, recent events have shown just how uneven policies can be.
Bush now claims that he is opposed to killing the mentally retarded, but as governor of Texas he allowed the execution of six inmates with IQs lower than 70. Now, the current Texas governor is vetoing a law that would outlaw just that. This comes not long after another Bush, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, made executing the mentally retarded illegal in his state.
To see that the death penalty is unevenly carried out, and therefore inherently unfair, one need not look beyond the Bush family, who can't even decide on policy among themselves. This division indicates the moral dilemma over the death penalty.
Killing Garza was wrong, and killing the other inmates on death row will be just as wrong until the country can come to some consensus on how, when and against whom the death penalty should be applied. If he kept up his current pace of one a week, Bush would see more than 200 federal executions before he leaves office. If that isn't cruel and unusual, what is?
(Megan Moyer is a Cavalier Daily columnist. She can be reached at mmoyer@cavalierdaily.com.)
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