Wife on Death Row spurns clemency plea

JOHN CARLIN

Washington

Guinevere Garcia wants to die. Many people, in her shoes, would want to die too. In a week's time the state of Illinois plans to oblige her: Wednesday 17 January is the date scheduled for her execution.

The bald facts of the case are that Garcia, who is 35 and had previously been jailed for killing her baby, shot her husband dead after a drunken quarrel in July 1991. A court sentenced her to death in October 1992.

Against Garcia's explicit wishes, Amnesty International has launched a campaign to deprive her of her dying wish.

The Governor of Illinois, who has the power to grant a pardon, has been besieged by letters from Amnesty members world-wide.

In response to a formal petition for clemency co-signed by Bianca Jagger, a member of the Amnesty International Leadership Council, the Illinois Prison Review Board meets tomorrow to hear the case for a reprieve.

When Guinevere Garcia, born Swan, was 18 months old her alcoholic mother plunged to her death from an apartment window.

Her father abandoned her and her grandparents took her in. When she was six an uncle raped her, which he continued to do for the next five years. Court records show that while the grandmother did nothing to stop the abuse, she did express concern as to whether the uncle was wearing a condom.

At 14 the girl was gang-raped by five teenage boys, none of whom was convicted, and shortly afterwards her grandfather sold her in marriage for $1,500 to an Iranian student who sought legal residency status in the United States.

When she was 15 she became a stripper and a prostitute. When she was 17 she gave birth to a daughter - not by her husband - whom she called Sara. Rows with the grandmother over custody of the baby, combined with the fear that her child would inherit the mother's fate, led her to suffocate Sara when she was 11 months old.

In 1983 she pleaded guilty to Sara's murder (she had been arrested in 1981) and was sentenced to 20 years in prison; she served 10. On her release she married George Garcia, who was 60 and a client from her days as a prostitute. It was not a happy marriage. On one occasion, as medical records show, he attacked her with a piece of glass, inflicting a two-inch cut in her vaginal and rectal walls.

One night in July 1991 she went home drunk, straight from a fight with the uncle who had raped her as a child, and shot her husband. In October 1992 she was sentenced to death by lethal injection.

The court found that she had not been "under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance at the time of the crime".

In November 1994 the case went to the Supreme Court on appeal. Five of the seven judges concurred with the sentence which, by majority ruling, was upheld.

One of the dissenting judges, Justice Freeman, said in a document made public in March last year that the court had been "clearly wrong" in failing to take properly into account the factors in mitigation of sentence.

Justice Freeman's arguments will form part of the clemency case at tomorrow's prison-board hearing.

Ms Jagger will be among those testifying. In the petition, dated 5 January, which she co-wrote with an Illinois prison-rights advocate, she said: "If clemency is refused to Guinevere Garcia, the cycle of violence against this woman is completed and all of us are shamed ... The execution of Guinevere Garcia is the ultimate act of injustice against this battered woman."

Garcia believes death would be the ultimate act of mercy. She recently told a judge: "I don't want to die, Your Honour, but my life is miserable. I made peace with God and myself. I am sitting in prison while my victims are dead. My life has no purpose, no meaningful existence." In an interview, Ms Jagger said she had agonised over her decision to intervene in the case: "I can understand, of course, why she feels the only thing left for her is to die. But I also feel that the state has no right to execute her.

"She is the quintessential case of a battered woman and an abandoned child. What I have discovered is that in almost all instances, the people on Death Row who have withdrawn their appeals against execution have been abused as children; almost all the women on Death Row have histories of terrible degradation."

If the Review Board hearing goes Garcia's way, she will be only the second woman to be executed since the reintroduction of the death penalty in the United States in 1977 and the first to be executed in Illinois since 1938.