DEATH DELAYED

Clinton Postponed The First Federal Execution In Decades. Good. Now Commute
The Sentence.

President Bill Clinton has postponed what would be the first federal
execution in almost four decades, delaying Juan Raul Garza's Aug. 5 date
with death at least until procedures for seeking clemency are put in place.

Anything that slows the official machinery of death is worth doing. It
would be better still if Clinton commuted Garza's sentence to life in
prison, and better yet if Congress repealed the law that put the federal
government back in the business of sanctioned killing. The death penalty is
discriminatory and plagued with error; it should be abandoned entirely.

The federal government went the other way in 1988 when it reinstated
capital punishment, absent a formal clemency procedure. The administration
says that's a critical oversight that must be corrected before any
executions are carried out. It is, and a procedure will be put in place in
a matter of weeks.

But with or without a formal process, the president's power to spare the
lives of those condemned to die is unquestioned. The problem of race is
much thornier.

When the law was reinstated, it was expanded to include drug kingpins.

Since then, officials have green-lighted capital prosecutions against 37
defendants. Thirty-three of those defendants are black or Hispanic, even
though three-quarters of those convicted under the drug-kingpin statute
have been white. At minimum, an ongoing Justice Department evaluation of
that disparity should be completed before anyone is put to death.

There is an obvious political element in postponing Garza's death. Although
Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore is a death-penalty supporter, an
execution during the campaign wouldn't help his chances for election. Right
now his Republican opponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, is the lightning
rod for death penalty foes. With 15 people slated for execution in Texas
before the election, Bush will have to make politically charged decisions
whether to spare any of those lives.

But politics aside, any federal executions would be unconscionable when the
determination of who dies is so powerfully linked to race.