WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal executions probably will not become commonplace, despite the unprecedented attention given to Timothy McVeigh, because there are relatively few candidates and many obstacles.

Before McVeigh was administered a lethal dose of drugs for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, no prisoner had been put to death under federal law in the United States since 1963. And even though another execution is scheduled in a week, there remains strong opposition to capital punishment from certain legal, social and political quarters.

The Oklahoma City bombing took the lives of 168 men, women and children, the worst act of domestic terrorism in the history of the country. It was a different kind of crime.

"McVeigh's execution has a unique place in history, but cases being processed now show a very different face of the federal death penalty system," said Elizabeth Semel, director of the American Bar Association's death penalty representation project.

The case of Juan Raul Garza, a 44-year-old Texas man convicted of murder and drug smuggling, is more typical of the approximately 350 defendants for whom federal prosecutors have sought the death penalty since 1988.

Garza is scheduled to be put to death a week from now at the same facility in Terre Haute, Ind., where McVeigh was executed Monday.

Whether the McVeigh case opens the way for regular executions by the federal government is debatable.

"It's much more easy now for it to happen again," said criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University. "The ice is broken."

Several recent events, however, illustrate the difficulty government officials encounter when they try to use the death penalty:

—Attorney General John Ashcroft had to assure French government officials this month that U.S. prosecutors would not seek the death penalty for James Charles Kopp, on the FBI's 10 most-wanted-fugitives list for the sniper slaying of an abortion doctor in upstate New York, if France would agree to extradite him to the United States.

Capital punishment is widely opposed in Europe, and President Bush is expected to encounter a host of demonstrations during his tour there this week. A final decision on Kopp's extradition is expected in France this week.

—Garza escaped the death chamber in December after then-President Clinton postponed his execution amid apprehension that the federal death penalty is racially and geographically prejudiced.

Garza is Hispanic, and his lawyers have appealed his sentence and applied for clemency. The filing is under review.

—In a case related to McVeigh's, lawyers for a Pennsylvania man facing the death penalty sought futilely to have McVeigh's execution videotaped. They lost at the Supreme Court, but the effort dramatized the lingering issue of whether the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Constitution's Eighth Amendment. The question lives on, even though courts have often refused to consider it.

—On June 4, the Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of Johnny Paul Penry for the slaying of a woman in 1979, which set up a court decision whether the mentally retarded can be executed.

Federal executions would seem at the very least to be infrequent events, based on the numbers.

Nineteen men are on federal death row; more than 220 were put to death in Texas alone since 1982 in state cases.

The United States had no death penalty from the mid-1960s until 1977, and federal prosecutors didn't start seeking death sentences until the mid-1980s.

That happened because a more crime-conscious Congress and administrations of both parties passed many new laws which greatly expanded the number of crimes punishable by death. Federal prosecutors sought the death penalty against 348 defendants from 1988 to 2000, Justice Department figures show.

Far more defendants face the death penalty on the state level. More than 3,700 state prisoners are on death row, and 33 state prisoners have been executed so far this year.

Some experts view Garza's execution, rather than McVeigh's, as the harbinger of federal executions in the years to come.

Of the 18 other inmates sitting on federal death row in Terre Haute, 14 are black, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

Many are convicted of drug or murder charges under laws passed since 1988, and all the cases are in various stages of appeal. None is expected to be scheduled for execution for several months.

A Justice Department study released last week said a review of more than 900 federal cases showed no evidence of racial bias.

Death penalty opponents immediately derided the review, saying it failed to take into account potential racial bias in the way federal prosecutors choose which defendant should be charged with capital offenses.