Dateline: 06/18/01

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected without comment two requests by convicted murderer and South Texas drug lord Juan Raul Garza to stay his execution now schedule for tomorrow morning in the same death chamber where Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed on June 11.

Garza is scheduled to die by lethal injection at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Tuesday at 7 am CDT. Garza's will be the second federal execution since 1963.

Attorneys for the 43-year Garza filed two appeals for a stay of execution to the Supreme Court and a request that President Bush commute the sentence to life in prison without parole. All three requests have now been denied. 

The first request to the Supreme Court was based on an appeal that Garza sentencing jury should have been told that life without parole was the only alternative to the death penalty.

The second appeal claimed the execution of Garza, who was born in Mexico, would violate the Organization of American States treaty on human rights.  The Supreme Court rejected both appeals without comment.

President Bush has also denied an appeal from Garza asking that his sentence be commuted to life in prison without chance for parole. In a letter to President Bush, Garza's attorneys stated, "... 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."

Garza, now 43, was convicted in August 1993 in Brownsville, Texas for killing one man and ordering two other murders during his involvement as the leader of a ring of South Texas drug smugglers who imported tons of marijuana into the U.S. between 1983 and 1993. Garza, an American citizen admitted the killings.

In December 2000, Garza was granted a six-month stay by President Clinton to allow the Justice Department to study "racial and geographic disparities in the federal death penalty system."

In a press conference held today, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer state that President Bush did not feel race had played a role in Garza's 1993 conviction. "All of the jurors individually certified that race, color, religious belief, national origin and sex were not involved in reaching their respective decisions,'' Fleischer said. "Furthermore, the prosecutor, judge and at least six of the jurors were, like Garza, Hispanic."

Juan Raul Garza is one of 20 federal inmates currently sentenced to death.