The death penalty and its alternatives. (Scan).(Brief Article)

President Bush has been denounced by European and American liberals for allowing the application of the death penalty. Among those whose cause was taken up by "human rights" groups abroad as well as domestically was Juan Raul Garza, a former drug kingpin convicted of three murders and described by one of his prosecutors as "the most violent man I've ever prosecuted."

Former President Clinton twice postponed Garza's execution, ostensibly on account of concerns about "the disturbing racial composition" of federal death row inmates--even though seven of Garza's reported eight murder victims were Hispanic, and the presiding judge at his trial was Hispanic, as were at least six of the jurors. So what would the rights groups have us do with men like Mr. Garza?

Death penalty opponents often argue that executing criminals is a needless act of inhumanity, since the threat of a sentence of life without parole is just as effective a deterrent to crime. Whatever one thinks of that claim in the abstract, the fact is that no jury has the legal authority to prevent government officials years or decades in the future from offering clemency or parole after all--or to prevent judges at some later date from finding grounds for a new trial. The latter possibility is illustrated by the new trial recently granted to Wilbert Rideau, who shot three hostages during a bank robbery in 1961, killing one of them. Mr. Rideau, now 59, was originally sentenced to death, but his sentence ...