In This Death Penalty Case, the Choices Were Too Few: “On Tuesday, the federal government is scheduled to conduct its second
execution in less than two weeks, after there were none for a
generation. Juan Raul Garza will be put to death for several drug-related
murders he committed a decade ago. One could argue that Timothy McVeigh’s
exceptional crime made him a likely candidate for execution in any society that
employs the death penalty. But the Garza case forces us to confront troubling
questions about not only the general fairness of a capital punishment system that
has a disproportionate impact on African-Americans and Hispanics, but also the
fairness of depriving Mr. Garza of a basic protection that every other federal
inmate on death row has received.” New York Times Op-Ed
