OFFICIALS CONSIDER DELAYING THE FIRST EXECUTION OF A FEDERAL INMATE IN
NEARLY 40 YEARS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 -- In a series of private meetings today, Attorney
General Janet Reno and her advisers forcefully debated whether
President Clinton should grant a reprieve to Juan Raul Garza, a
federal inmate who is scheduled to die next Tuesday by lethal injection.

Unless Mr. Clinton intervenes, Mr. Garza, a Texas man who has admitted
to three drug-related homicides, would become the first person
executed by the federal government since the Kennedy administration.

Today, amid a barrage of lobbying against the execution, government
officials said that Mr. Garza's 96- page petition for clemency had
evoked little sympathy, given the seriousness of his crimes -- and
despite pleas in the petition from Mr. Garza's 10-year old daughter
who wrote, "Please let my Daddy live."

Administration officials would not predict whether the execution would
actually be carried out next week. Although it may still go forward,
officials said they were searching for a justification to postpone it,
especially because a study is still under way into the fairness of
federal death-penalty procedures.

Mr. Clinton has expressed concern with the application of the federal
death penalty and officials said there was strong support within the
Justice Department to give Mr. Clinton a rationale that would allow
him to delay the execution -- possibly until after he leaves office
next month.

"On the whole, as a supporter of capital punishment, he believes he
has a special obligation to ensure that it's administered fairly and
effectively in the federal system," said Jake Siewert, the president's
spokesman.

Mr. Garza is one of 20 federal inmates on death row. None have ever
come as close as Mr. Garza to the scheduled date of execution, which
under federal rules must be carried out by lethal injection at a
specially designed unit at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind.

But questions about inequities in the application of the federal death
penalty have swirled around the issue for months and many prominent
people have lobbied the White House in recent days to declare a
moratorium on executions pending further analysis of apparent racial
and geographic disparities in its application.

The death penalty issue has followed a circuitous path in the federal
government, caught between the courts and rapidly changing political
currents. After the Supreme Court said in 1972 that the death penalty
was unconstitutional as then applied, states adopted a variety of
statutes that the court upheld.

In 1988, Congress adopted the "drug kingpin" law, permitting use of
the death penalty against people found guilty of murder in large-scale
narcotics trafficking operations.

In 1994, Congress enacted the Federal Death Penalty Act, which
expanded the the crimes punishable by death to include murders
committed during bank robberies, carjackings and destruction of
airplanes, trains or motor vehicles.

Mr. Garza's execution has already been postponed once by Mr. Clinton,
who granted a reprieve because of questions about the racial and
geographic disparities in the application of the federal death
penalty. In addition, the president expressed concern about the
absence of federal clemency procedures.

The issue became even more tangled in September when the Justice
Department issued a survey that found that in 75 percent of the cases
in which a federal prosecutor had sought the death penalty, the
defendant was a member of a minority group, and in more than half the
cases, an African-American.