U.S. Executes Mexican-American Drug Kingpin

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By Reuters

Published: 06/20/2001

Mexican-American drug lord and murderer Juan Raul Garza was executed at daybreak on Tuesday, in the same spot and with the same kind of drugs that killed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh eight days ago.
Garza was pronounced dead at 7:09 a.m. CDT, said Harley Lappin, warden of the U.S. Penitentiary near this Indiana college town.
About 90 minutes before the execution, Garza began a meeting with a Roman Catholic priest that lasted about half an hour. He had eaten a final meal of steak, French fries, onion rings and a soft drink, the warden said.
Lapin said Garza was cooperative at every stage of the process.
Garza, 44, lost his final appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court and with President Bush, who refused his plea for clemency. Garza admitted his crimes but said he was a changed man wanting his sentence reduced to life in prison without the chance of parole.
As with McVeigh, prison officials kept a line open to the Justice Department in the final hours before the execution in case there was an 11th-hour reprieve.
While Garza's death followed McVeigh's by little more than a week and was only the second federal government execution in nearly four decades, there were few other links between the two men and their crimes.
McVeigh had been convicted in the 1995 bombing that killed 168 men, women and children, the worst act of terrorism ever committed on U.S. soil. He died publicly unrepentant with a small army of media hanging on every detail of his last hours in prison and his final minutes in the death chamber.
Garza, leader of a huge Texas-based marijuana smuggling ring, was sentenced to die for committing a drug-related murder and ordering two other people killed.
Prosecutors described him as a vicious, dictatorial gang leader who gave little thought to wiping out rivals or suspected traitors, but his crimes drew few headlines outside the Texas border region near Brownsville where he grew up.
Prison officials said only about 70 media credentials had been issued for Garza's execution, a far cry from the 1,400 handed out for McVeigh. Gone were the tents and satellite trucks that dotted the prison grounds when McVeigh died on June 11.
Unlike McVeigh, Garza, said to be a devout Roman Catholic, had asked a local priest to be his spiritual advisor and to offer solace in his final hours. The priest, the Rev. Ron Ashmore of Terre Haute, also had corresponded with McVeigh.
McVeigh did not have a spiritual advisor but it was announced after his execution that he received a final anointing sacrament of the Catholic church from a prison chaplain. The rite was once called extreme unction and is given to both people who are sick and near death.
Both executions, however, did fuel the continuing debate in the United States over the death penalty.
Garza's execution had been postponed twice, the last time by former President Bill Clinton who ordered a federal investigation into whether a disproportionate number of minorities were sentenced to die.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said that investigation had found there was no such disparity.
Garza's lawyers had argued that the sentencing phase of his trial violated an Organization of American States treaty on human rights.
The United States ``risks losing its stature as a co-equal member of the OAS and as the human rights leader if it rejects its obligations to abide by the rule of international law and fails to honor the treaties it signs,'' they said in a letter to the White House.
They had also warned that Garza's execution could ``have adverse consequences for our future relations with the government of Mexico,'' because that country would not have agreed to his extradition if it knew he faced a death penalty trial. Mexico has not carried out an execution in about a half century.
The Mexican government had already intervened in an Oklahoma case where a Mexican man, Gerardo Valdez Mota, was to die for a killing. Gov. Frank Keating ordered a 30-day stay after President Vicente Fox said the prisoner's rights were not honored under international law at the time of his arrest.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, meanwhile, angered death penalty foes by vetoing legislation that would have banned the execution of mentally retarded persons in the state. He said existing law provided all of the protection needed in such cases.
Garza, a U.S. citizen, grew up in a migrant worker family.
The Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972 but reinstated it four years later. After that the states resumed executions and well over 700 have been carried out.
Congress finally renewed the federal death penalty in laws passed in 1988 and 1994 for a variety of penalties including drug trafficking deaths of the kind that drew Garza the death sentence.

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