The federal drug kingpin law

(CNN) The death sentence of Juan Raul Garza, who is scheduled to be executed Tuesday, June 19, has placed a spotlight on the U.S. drug kingpin law.

The law, passed in 1988, imposes a death sentence for murder resulting from large-scale illegal drug dealing. The law was expanded in 1994 to cover dozens more crimes, many of them drug-related or violent.

Currently there are 20 inmates on federal death row, according to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons. Last week's execution of Timothy McVeigh was the first federal execution since 1963.

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Human-rights organizations have criticized the federal death penalty as being biased against minorities.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, from 1988 to 1994, 75 percent of defendants convicted of participating in drug trafficking under the 1988 drug kingpin law were white. Of the drug trafficking cases in which the prosecution sought the death penalty, however, only 11 percent of those convicted were white, while 89 percent were Hispanic or black.

A congressional subcommittee determined that some of the people prosecuted under the kingpin law did not really qualify as kingpins, but rather were young black men in inner-city gangs or low-level individuals who had committed crimes for the kingpins.

But in early June a U.S. Department of Justice review refuted such claims. The study found that over a five-year period ending last summer, the death penalty was sought at lower rates for black and Hispanic defendants than white defendants eligible for capital punishment.

On Monday, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft reaffirmed the federal position that there was no racial bias in the Garza case, emphasizing the prosecutor was Hispanic, as were seven of the eight victims.