The New York Times

Tuesday, December 12, 2000

Death Penalty Doubts

(Editorial)

President Clinton's decision last week to delay the execution of Juan Raul Garza for six months pending further study of troubling racial and geographic disparities in the federal death penalty system was a small but significant act of conscience. Mr. Garza, a confessed murderer who had been scheduled to die by lethal injection this morning, would have been the first federal prisoner put to death in 37 years.

While reaffirming his support for the death penalty, Mr. Clinton lamented the glaring inequities in the imposition of federal death sentences identified in a Justice Department study in September. It found that since 1995, four-fifths of the 682 defendants who have faced capital charges in the federal courts were minority members. Moreover, the study found that a handful of United States attorneys accounted for 40 percent of federal death penalty cases - an indicator of the prosecutorial discretion that results when there is no uniform federal standard for imposing death. Indeed, 14 of the 20 federal death row inmates are from only three states - Virginia, Missouri and Texas.

In postponing the execution, Mr. Clinton recognized that it would be unconscionable for the United States, whose continued embrace of the death penalty is out of step with the rest of the civilized world, to go ahead with an execution amid the swirling uncertainty about the system's fairness. But the temporary stay for Mr. Garza - the second Mr. Clinton has granted in the case - fell short of the complete moratorium on federal executions that the evidence of unfairness the president cited in his remarks logically and humanely calls for.