When William Barr, the attorney general, announced plans to put five federal prisoners to death by the end of January, he set in motion what could be the U.S. government’s first executions since 2003. In fact, the federal government has carried out the death penalty only three times in the past fifty-six years, most prominently against the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, whose truck bomb was responsible for the deaths of a hundred and sixty-eight people, in 1995. The other two condemned men have largely been forgotten: Juan Raul Garza, a marijuana smuggler who murdered a Texas-trucking-company manager and ordered two other deaths, and Louis Jones, Jr., a Gulf War veteran who kidnapped a teen-age soldier from a military base, then raped and murdered her.
Barr said that “we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” He made no mention of any other purpose to the executions. Not deterrence, in the face of studies that show no positive correlation between the death penalty and murder rates. Not removing felons from society, a task that lengthy sentences do effectively. Not cost, considering research that demonstrates it’s more expensive to sentence an inmate to death than to sentence him to life. Rather, Barr explained that the capital-punishment laws were duly constituted by Congress, and the Justice Department “upholds the rule of law.” A press release from his office ended with a declaration: “Additional executions will be scheduled at a later date.”
The Trump Administration’s return to the death penalty hardly seems likely to change the direction of the debate around the country, where only half of the states currently enforce it, or the world, where a hundred and twenty countries voted last year, in the United Nations General Assembly, to recommend a moratorium on the practice. More than anything, it is a political signal. As I heard the news, I couldn’t help but think of Garza, who was executed eight days after McVeigh, in the same room, at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. As a reporter for the Washington Post, I joined a small group of journalists who witnessed his execution. What, I wondered then, did his death accomplish?
Sunrise came early on June 19, 2001, one of the longest days of the year, and the media witnesses, whose names had been drawn from among the willing, assembled for the walk through the prison yard to a squat, red brick building that contained the execution chamber. The building had a series of windowless doors, allowing different groups of witnesses, including those present for the victims and for the condemned man, to enter without encountering one another. The reporters stood in a small, unadorned room facing a curtained picture window, and waited.
The turquoise curtains opened, as in a theatre production. We beheld a setting resembling an operating room, with tile walls and floors. Lying silently, on an elevated bed, a laundered white sheet pulled up to his shoulders, was Juan Raul Garza, age forty-four. With the curtains now open, he looked from window to window in an effort to see the witnesses’ faces. Four relatives of his victims were in one room. A person identified by authorities as his spiritual adviser was in another. Garza, who received multiple visits from his relatives in his final days, had asked his children, including a son, age twelve, and daughter, age ten, to stay away. They waited across town. “I don’t want to be in the place where they kill my father,” his son said.
At 7:04 a.m., Garza said, from the bed, “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.” U.S. Marshal Frank Anderson picked up a red telephone receiver and asked someone in a Justice Department command center, “May we proceed with the execution?” The Supreme Court had already turned down his final appeals, and President George W. Bush had rejected a plea for clemency. Anderson listened for a moment. He then said, at 7:05 a.m., “Warden, you may proceed with the execution.”
Garza moved his feet nervously. The drugs that would stop his lungs, and then his heart, flowed through tubes that stretched from a far wall, each taking about sixty seconds to cross the room and enter his body. He blinked a few times. I wrote at the time that his eyes looked distant, and then went dull. The edges of his lips turned slightly blue. He died with his eyes open. It was all over in four minutes. The warden, Harley G. Lappin, announced, “Inmate Garza died at 7:09 a.m., Central Daylight Time. This concludes the execution.”
Source: The New Yorker, Peter Slevin, September 4, 2019
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
