MURDERER EXECUTED IN SAME PLACE AS MCVEIGH

A Lot Less Fanfare

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. - Mexican-American drug lord and murderer Juan Raul Garza
was executed at daybreak yesterday, in the same spot and with the same kind
of drugs that killed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh eight days ago.

"I just want to say that I'm sorry and I apologize for all the pain and
grief that I have caused. I ask for your forgiveness and God bless," the
44-year-old Garza said just before the drugs were injected into his body.

He was pronounced dead three minutes later at 7:09 a.m., said Harley
Lappin, warden of the U.S. penitentiary near this Indiana college town.

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.

He was the second person executed by the federal government since 1963.
McVeigh was the first.

After the execution, one of Garza's lawyers, Greg Wiercioch, called for a
moratorium on federal executions, saying they amounted to an unjustifiable
"precise savagery."

There are 18 people still under federal death sentence, all held at the
same Indiana jail, although no additional execution dates have been set.

"We have someone here who expressed remorse for his crimes. He's not a
threat to anyone, and that's one of the big issues," Mr. Wiercioch said.

Media witnesses who viewed the execution said it proceeded in the same
fashion as McVeigh's.

Like the Oklahoma City bomber, Garza died with his eyes open. His head was
tilted slightly to the side, unlike McVeigh who stared at a TV camera in
the ceiling that carried a closed-circuit feed of the execution back to
Oklahoma City where some of his victims and surviving family members watched.

Garza appeared calm.

About 90 minutes before the execution, Garza had a meeting with a Roman
Catholic priest that lasted about half an hour. The priest also witnessed
the execution from an adjoining room where Garza could see him through a
window.

Garza admitted his crimes but said he was a changed man, wanting his
sentence reduced to life in prison without the chance of parole. He lost
his final appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court and with George W. Bush, the
U.S. President, who refused his plea for clemency.

As Garza died, about 50 people protesting the death penalty gathered in a
fenced-in area on the prison grounds to pray.

Prison officials said only about 70 media credentials were 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 the
Oklahoma bomber died on June 11.

Garza's execution had been postponed twice, the last time by then 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.