juan garza was executed in indiana this morning,

June 19, 2001 10:37 AM

juan garza was executed in indiana this morning, in the same room where timothy mcveigh died. why no hullabaloo this time?
posted by rabi (19 comments total)

garza was convicted of murdering three men. his case had been reviewed twice after stays were granted by president clinton. he had recently petitioned the white house, once on the grounds that his jury hadn't taken the possibility of life without parole into proper consideration and once because he thought his human rights had been violated. he had argued that the death penalty is biased against minorities (he is texas-born hispanic). this is only the second federal execution in several decades -- is it being ignored because we are all worn out from the high-profile mcveigh execution, or would it have gone unnoticed even in isolation?
posted by rabi at 10:42 AM on June 19, 2001

He didn't kill enough people. 168 beats 3 every time when it comes to media interest.
posted by aaron at 10:45 AM on June 19, 2001

Also, Garza's crime had no agenda behind it. He was a drug trafficker who killed (or ordered the killings of) others in the drug market. He was not making a political statement, he was just escalating the corruptness of his venture. There isn't much to discuss or debate when a drug lord whacks his own, and gets caught and punished for it.
posted by Dreama at 10:50 AM on June 19, 2001

is it being ignored because we are all worn out from the high-profile mcveigh execution, or would it have gone unnoticed even in isolation?

If it weren't for McVeigh, this would be the first federal execution since 1963. Probably would have gotten noticed then.
posted by turaho at 10:51 AM on June 19, 2001

Even if he killed 168 drug dealers, I don't think anyone would have cared as much as McVeigh's bomb/political statement.

In fact, some people would have applauded his efforts.
posted by jragon at 11:04 AM on June 19, 2001

murder is murder and nothing justifies murder
posted by Zebulun at 12:32 PM on June 19, 2001

I'm an ocean away, have never even been to America, and i knew about it. Of course it wasn't big big like McVeigh but neither were the variables - the crimes, the motives, the effects; the ready-made audience. The only similarities about both of these stories is the punishment and its location. Still, it is up there in the world news/comment arena and from what i can see is being far from ignored. You do have a fairly good implied point though (in that this event wasn't fresh! and unique! and was hot on the heels of an event that may have led to some public-fatigue-fueled-blindness of its main issues due to a degree of recent media hysteria resulting in mass-market saturation that may have had a direct effect on this episode not getting blown out of proportion in the schedules. Still, asking why not the hullabaloo that surrounded the McVeigh thing strikes me as being akin to throwing an atom into a pond and wondering why it wont splash like a rock).
posted by Kino at 1:13 PM on June 19, 2001

'he had argued that the death penalty is biased against minorities (he is texas-born hispanic)'.

As far as i'm aware so was the judge, the prosecutor and half the jury.
posted by Kino at 1:23 PM on June 19, 2001

As ambivalent as I am about the death penalty, I don't believe it's useful to classify it as murder. For starters, self-defense frequently justifies killing, and in quite a number of US states, threats to property, or merely assumed threats, seem to justify it as well. I don't defend that, but it's there; in that context execution for 168 deaths is pretty hard to argue down.

Kino, the cop stopping a law-abiding citizen just because he's black in the wrong place at the wrong time can also be black. That doesn't justify it. A recent Weekly Standard column tried to argue that because many criminals are black, black people should expect to be stopped by the police at any time, and shouldn't expect to catch cabs. That's simply wrong. Nobody's seriously arguing that in these cases the cabbies or the police hate minorities; they simply aren't guaranteed a fair shake under the existing system. In the NYC taxicab case, the city ended up spending money to make livery cabs -- high victims of robberies -- more secure, so that they could continue serving the neighborhoods where they're needed the most. Similarly, we should make every effort to ensure that discrimination does not occur in a system where the penalty is literally death.
posted by dhartung at 1:49 PM on June 19, 2001

Next week, the states resume their business. Five executions in Texas before Labor Day.
posted by holgate at 1:50 PM on June 19, 2001

What amazes me is how many people from outside the states are conversant in and concerned about our various death penalty cases. Much more so, in some cases, than the actual people of the US. I wonder why that is?

While I nearly lost my mind over the whole O'Reilly incident, one of the things he said stuck in my mind, the idea that while 80% of the people polled were behind the execution of McVeigh, they didn't want to have to watch it. There's a certain amount of out of sight, out of mind going on here.

Sure, we want them dead. Out of range, if you wouldn't mind. To a certain degree, it reminds me of the way many people who eat meat aren't interested in knowing anything about how meat gets to the store. One of the better tactics of groups like PETA was in simply telling many of these people, in graphic detail, exactly what it was that happened to the pretty cows to reduce them to flank steas and T-Bones and the like. (Didn't work on me, because I used to do it every summer on my dad's farm.) People wanted to eat meat, but not to know anything about how it got there, preferring to assume it sort of magically appeared in the plastic and styrofoam.

Our criminal justice system has a similar myopia turned towards it. We want these people to magically go away, it seems to me, to just go away and leave us alone. We have no stomach for the actual act of killing them. (This is a generalization, of course...plenty of people have plenty of stomach for killing. Some of them we kill, others we put into the military or employ in our intelligence agencies, some live normal lives and go hunting occassionally. Others deal with this capacity in other ways. None of this has any direct relation to the See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil tendency of the nation when confronted with the Death Penalty, but I thought I'd acknowlege it so that no one reading this who has no difficulty with the concept of killing would be offended.) Anyone who heard the Nightline broadcast of the Georgia Execution tapes heard the act of killing reduced to a bland, soggy, remorseless act as strangely banal as it was chilling. Execution as gruel, calculated to lull even the actual person being killed into a dull state of compliance. No one makes any sudden moves, talks above a whisper, does or says anything to break the spell that this is just a routine thing, nothing special here, don't think too much about it.

What I found amazing was how little reaction the condemned had. No screaming, no fighting. It reminded me a bit of the men and women going up the scaffold to the Georgian hangman, and trying to see who could face death with the most aplomb. Except it wasn't that, either. It was more a listless acceptance, as if all the waiting for death had clubbed the life out of them already. Whether or not you think the death penalty is justified, you have to admit it seems odd that the convicted would not resist at all. After all, they are being taken to their deaths, and we expect life to struggle in the presence of its undoing. But we hear none of that, on the tape.

Perhaps the true horror is in how tedious it is. Perhaps that is what the people do not want to see, the mechanization of death. If they did, if they realized how bleak and rote we have made it...well, who is to say? There are those who would be affected, and those who would not.

I still think we should look, though. We have judged these men guilty, and taking their lives should require that we all know what it is we do. It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You're taking everything he has, everything he was ever gonna have. Sorry to quote Eastwood here, but it's a point we should consider.
posted by Ezrael at 2:21 PM on June 19, 2001

kino, I never expected this to get the same kind of press and attention that mcveigh did. but it sort of surprised me that I hadn't heard anything about it until I read the paper this morning, after the guy had already died. these are the only two people who've been killed by the federal government in my life -- in fact, none of the states I've lived in have killed people while I was there either.

so I don't know: is this ex post facto coverage (and general apathy) the norm?
posted by rabi at 2:32 PM on June 19, 2001

I hadn't heard anything about it until I read the paper this morning, after the guy had already died.

Really. I might be an exception being a news junkie that watches hours of news shows, but this was all over FNC, MSNBC, and CNN last night.
posted by gyc at 4:14 PM on June 19, 2001

oh, well that's slightly reassuring. maybe I'm just out of the loop. (I don't usually watch or read the news at night.)
posted by rabi at 5:27 PM on June 19, 2001

What amazes me is how many people from outside the states are conversant in and concerned about our various death penalty cases. Much more so, in some cases, than the actual people of the US. I wonder why that is?

Perhaps because the US appears, at least to this Old Worldian, an incredible paradox: the first place to enact the principles of the European enlightenment, but which remains, in so many elements of social policy, a memoria of the world we left behind.

That's perhaps why I was disappointed by the heavy-handedness of Lileks' piece on "Bush in Europe". Because in a sense, we expect so much (too much?) of the USA: like a child, it carries our best wishes, in the knowledge that it has so much potential, so much ability to do more; and yet it disappoints us. That we actually like Bush as a person -- a man that has grown out of his extended adolescence -- but wonder how he picked up all of these ideas that we ourselves grew out of. He's like a child who didn't take up the family business -- which, to be honest, we didn't have that much love of ourselves -- but y'know, there's so much potential.

We don't resent the USA for its successes, I think. We regret its perceived emulations, its re-enactments of arguments we regard as obsolete. We want America to be the summation of our ideals, the realisation of our dreams, even though we know that such aspirations can only, ultimately be curtailed.

And I know that reads like paternalistic claptrap. And I wish it didn't. Over the past five years, I've spent a lot of time in the US, and I just feed off the country: its diversity and character and hope and aspiration. And the extremes are a part of it: there are few places, I think, that take in such a spectrum. But I can't help wishing that the sharp edges were smoother.
posted by holgate at 5:55 PM on June 19, 2001

Dhartung: The scenario you offer of a minority police officer holding the perception that local minorities of his own ethnicity generally commit more crimes for whatever reason and him then targeting these random minorities for searches, etc on the grounds of race because he fully believes he'll have more success in catching criminals that way is a fair point and i agree that officer would be acting very wrongly and in a thoroughly victimizing manner - but it can be logicized and the reasons why he does so explained. I can't see what all that has to do with me mentioning that Juan Garzas judge, prosecutor and half his jury were fellow Hispanics though.

Reason: It would be a lot harder to come to any conclusions about why a Hispanic prosecutor would be able to convince a half Hispanic jury of a Hispanic persons guilt before a Hispanic judge on the serious charge of multiple murder unless they considered the evidence quite suffice. I can't envision them reaching their conclusions on the grounds of mass racial prejudice against their own ethnicity, but they might, so lets say they did. What's the chances of a Hispanic judge then missdirecting the sentencing jury, witholding information about alternatives to execution (or however else he might want to play it), and then issuing that fellow Hispanic a death sentence all on the grounds of some weird extreme form of racial prejudice. It'd take a very special type of rare mental disorder for him and the court to issue a harsher severity of sentence for a fellow Hispanic under those circumstances than they would for say a white guy. Especially one of death. It isn't an impossible thought but if a Hispanic guy on death row yells 'racial prejudice', then the overwhelmingly Hispanic ethnic blend of the people in the courtroom responsible for deciding his fate can be mentioned briefly for clarity in a conversation about it without that action having to be defended. Good point about how the death penalty shouldn't be tagged as 'murder' though.

Ezreal: I'm guilty of washing from my mind memories of cute cattle closeups i see on tv or whatever. I have to because it does bother me - but not enough to turn vegi. The thought of how people prefer to not think of the farming/slaughter process when they sit down to eat lunch made me recall a rather amusing comment from a serious talk radio caller "if we weren't supposed to eat animals they wouldn't be made out of meat!"
posted by Kino at 6:10 PM on June 19, 2001

Kino: Your problem with the statement has to do with your confusion of discrimination result with discrimination intent. I'm not saying that the black cops (in my example) or the Hispanic judge and jury (in Garza's case) intended to discriminate. I am saying that discrimination is real regardless of intent.

Efforts to eliminate discrimination should not be confused with efforts to label people as bigots. They are not the same thing.
posted by dhartung at 10:05 PM on June 19, 2001

Dhartung, i can see definite solid in-your-face evidence of discrimination result in the hypothetical case of the cop, but only a very slim chance of the possibility of either intent or result in the real case of the court based on what we know. Nor can i see enough of a connection between the two for the first to be interjected. Subconscious discrimination is very real, and so is the nasty type, but what makes you assume, enough to conjure up the comparison, that Garza was the victim of either?.
posted by Kino at 11:19 PM on June 19, 2001

And I know that reads like paternalistic claptrap. And I wish it didn't. Over the past five years, I've spent a lot of time in the US, and I just feed off the country: its diversity and character and hope and aspiration. And the extremes are a part of it: there are few places, I think, that take in such a spectrum. But I can't help wishing that the sharp edges were smoother.

Never gonna happen, and I for one am glad it won't. As much as I find much to abhor in my homeland, we are now an adolescent nation. 225 this July 4th, and from a lowly beginning as a source of goods and services we've gone far, done and seen much, completed the rape of the natives the European nations started, turned on ourselves in that endless retread of Cain and Abel, stolen the perogative of that strange Asian peninsula that birthed us, and are now that alchemical nation, that bastardized land, primordial matter given a social twist.

I think viewing us as the culmination of the European Enlightenment is a uniquely European conceit. It implies that Europe sent us here to do this, when in fact, most of our people were the scrap that was tossed aside, people not quite wicked enough for the gallows. The fact that in a very short amount of time we managed to derive philosophers, who extrapolated ideas in Europe to their logical conclusion, is not to assume this is deliberate. We are your bastard. If we behave in ways you did not expect or do not approve, well...this is only to be expected.

You were not good parents.

This isn't meant to be taken as stone throwing, either...I have said in the past and will say in the future that Europe and America need to start acknowledging their common history and working more closely together on a whole series of issues. But the fact is, working out such a partnership will be difficult, in part because Europeans often do take a paternalistic view of us as Children dressing up in our daddy's clothes, and because we often think of Europe as weak. Weak artistically, weak in literature, weak in national spirit, weak in moral character. In other words, you think of us as the punk kid, and we think of you as the old man. The fact is, if we are to work together, neither of us can always be in charge, and both would like to be.

And none of this has to do with the death penalty, unfortunately. I think it's interesting that Europe, the land of the guillotine and the gallows, has abandoned it. I wonder if Europe is murdered out. After all, you've had ten times the rapine and slaughter, chronologically speaking, and that's just in the Christian Era. We'd have to work very hard to catch up, and I'm including the destruction of the natives and slavery in that statement. Or perhaps it was the brutality of WWII, which brought home how the power of the state to inflict death upon its citizens could be misused. There's a big difference between having that happen in your backyard and having it happen across town, if I might make one lazy metaphor.

Ultimately, I'm no closer to understanding this than I was. I still think the US has created a system whereby we don't have to deal with the blood on our hands (in many ways) and I have no idea how to fix it. I also don't know how to address the inequities of US/European relations. The US talks a lot about world opinion when we want someone else to act more like us, but when the world turns a jaundiced eye our way, we don't care.

America's a teenager, I think.
posted by Ezrael at 2:35 AM on June 20, 2001