LAWYERS TRYING TO STOP EXECUTION CITE FLAWS IN BIAS REPORT

WASHINGTON, June 12 -- 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.