19 federal inmates wait on death row with McVeigh

TERRE HAUTE -- The planned execution of Timothy McVeigh will leave 19 other men in the cramped cells of federal death row, all wondering if his fate will someday be their own.\n"There certainly is a psychological barrier that will be passed on May 16," attorney Gregory Wiercioch said. "To start up the machinery of the federal death penalty after it's been lying dormant for four decades. It may make it easier for the next one to take place."\nThat next execution may well be Wiercioch's client. Juan Garza, a convicted drug kingpin and murderer, is set to die by lethal injection June 19, a little more than a month after McVeigh.\nAs Garza's legal team fights for clemency or a delay, Wiercioch said it was ludicrous to compare McVeigh's situation to anyone else on death row.\nMcVeigh was found guilty of one of the most heinous crimes in American history, the Oklahoma City federal building bombing that killed 168 people. His fellow inmates are guilty of lower-profile crimes, most involving drug-related murders or murders committed during bank robberies or carjackings.\nFourteen of the remaining 19 federal prisoners facing death sentences are black and three are Hispanic.\nAll that, say Wiercioch and other death penalty opponents, points to a federal death penalty system that is not being used fairly or consistently.\n"You've got a death row that is almost all minority," said Elisabeth Semel, director of the American Bar Association's Death Penalty Representation Project. "What are the reasons for that? The system is broken, and the only way to ensure that it gets fixed is to stop it."\nThe last federal prisoner executed was Victor Feguer, hanged in 1963 for kidnapping and murdering an Iowa doctor.\nHis was the last of 34 federal executions from 1927 to 1963. The others, including two women, were of inmates convicted of rape, murderer, spying and sabotage.\nSix Nazi officers who landed in the United States intending to sabotage factories were executed in 1942, all on the same day. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of relaying American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, were put to death in 1953 at Sing Sing State Prison in New York.\nThen, as now, the death penalty had its opponents. John Ely Jr., a former Iowa legislator, was at Feguer's hanging, held at the Iowa State Penitentiary, hoping to gain publicity for his stance against the death penalty.\n "This was going to be the beginning of the end of capital punishment," said Ely, 82, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.\n Ely recalled watching Feguer, his head wrapped in a black hood, swinging from the gallows. He said Feguer's final words were: "I hope mine is the last execution."\n For years it seemed like it would be.\n In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state, and in turn federal, execution procedures were unconstitutional. It wasn't until 1988, during the explosion of crack cocaine use, that the federal death penalty was brought back, narrowly applied to cases of murder in the course of a drug kingpin conspiracy.\n In 1994, as part of a national crime bill, the federal death penalty was expanded to about 60 offenses, including some crimes not involving murder, like running a large-scale drug enterprise.\n Under these laws, McVeigh and the 19 other inmates on federal death row were convicted. In 1999, they were all brought together.\nIt was called Operation Golden Eagle. Practically overnight, the nation's 20 most notorious prisoners were brought to western Indiana and placed inside a new Special Confinement Unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute.