TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) — Sitting behind the looming figure of Timothy McVeigh is a more ordinary federal death row inmate, one whose crimes don't seem so shocking, one whose name few people know.

One is responsible for killing 168 people with a truck bomb. The other was convicted of killing one man and arranging the deaths of two others as part of the drug smuggling operation he created.

One is seen by many as reason enough to have the federal death penalty. The other, Juan Raul Garza, is seen by many as the exact reason why the federal death penalty should not exist.

"I think what we're hoping we can accomplish with Juan Garza's case is to just somehow be heard above all of this sound and fury and white noise that's surrounding the McVeigh case," said Garza's attorney, Gregory Wiercioch. "That case is really overshadowing some serious systemic problems with the federal death penalty system."

Garza, 44, was convicted of running a marijuana smuggling operation, killing a man and ordering the slayings of two others he thought were informants.

The Texas drug kingpin narrowly escaped the death chamber in December amid concerns that the federal death penalty is racially or geographically biased. President Clinton ordered the Justice Department to review the government's use of capital punishment.

Now, just weeks away from Garza's June 19 lethal injection, there has been no word from the department, and officials there will not comment on whether the review will be completed in time.

McVeigh's execution for the Oklahoma City bombing is set for June 11, though his attorneys are seeking a stay based on newly revealed FBI documents. If McVeigh's execution is delayed, Garza would be the first federal prisoner put to death since 1963.

Garza's attorneys have filed a plea for clemency, citing cases involving similar crimes, including the murder case of a mob hit man in New York, where federal prosecutors never pursued the death penalty.

Wiercioch and other death penalty opponents also raise questions about how Garza's ethnicity played into his death sentence: Garza, who is Hispanic, is one of 17 minority inmates out of the 20 men currently on federal death row.

Another factor is that Garza was sentenced to death in Texas, which has sent more men to federal death row than any other state. Texas and Virginia alone account for half the 20 inmates on federal death row, leading critics to say capital punishment is not sought consistently from state to state.

Bruce Gilchrist, another of Garza's attorneys, said "there's every reason to believe that if he wasn't Hispanic and hadn't committed his crimes in Texas, but was from a white crime family in New York or New Jersey, he wouldn't be on death row today."

Justice Department officials have refused to comment on allegations that Garza's case has been shaped by race or geography.

A Justice Department study released last year showed that between 1995 and July 2000, nine of the 94 U.S. attorney districts accounted for nearly half the 183 defendants recommended for the death penalty.

They were Puerto Rico, the eastern district of Virginia, Maryland, the eastern and southern districts of New York, western Missouri, New Mexico, western Tennessee and northern Texas. Forty districts never recommended the death penalty.

Robert Litt, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, said there is "a question of whether the way the system is set up produces arbitrary and discriminatory results."

"I don't understand what the rush is to execute somebody before you get answers to these questions," said Litt, who is now part of the group Citizens for a Moratorium on Federal Executions.

In a videotaped clemency appeal given to former President Clinton last year, Garza said he was "embarrassed" for letting down his father and other family members.

"I feel embarrassed for letting him down. This is not what he raised me to be, but I chose the wrong path, and I made some big mistakes, which I regret," Garza said in the videotape, aired Monday night on CNN.

Prosecutors characterized him as a ruthless man who considered murder a way of doing business. When one employee crossed Garza, he was driven onto a farm road, where Garza shot him in the back of the head, dumped his body in the brush, then shot him four more times.

"He's about as violent as anybody I've seen," said Mark Patterson, the chief federal prosecutor at Garza's trial.

U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela said he does not accept claims of racial bias in Garza's case. "In this particular case, the judge was Hispanic, the defendant was Hispanic, a majority of the jurors were Hispanic and the victims were Hispanic," he said.