Woman Convict Fights To End Her Life Of Abuse

Guinevere Garcia was orphaned and sexually abused by age 6, an alcoholic at 11, and pregnant at 16 with a daughter whom she later suffocated with a plastic bag.

An abuse-scarred marriage to a man she met on a prostitution “trick” ended when she shot her husband to death. She later said he “deserved to die.”

Now Garcia says she, too, deserves to die.

Barring a last-minute clemency decision from Gov. Jim Edgar, Garcia, 36, will die by lethal injection shortly after midnight Wednesday. She would be the second woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

The execution will be a triumph of sorts for Garcia, who has angrily told death penalty opponents trying to block her execution to “stay out of my life.”

“This is not a suicide. I am not taking my own life. I committed these crimes. I am responsible for these crimes,” Garcia said in a tape played Thursday for the state Prisoner Review Board.

Garcia’s determination to embrace the death sentence perplexes death penalty opponents, who say they respect her decision but want to fight for her life anyway. Her decision last summer to drop all appeals in the 1991 slaying brought Garcia more tranquility than she has ever had in her troubled life, said Sister Miriam Wilson, a Cook County Jail chaplain who has frequently visited her.

“There’s a great peace about her,” said Sister Miriam, a Roman Catholic nun. “I think that she made a decision and feels that it was the right decision, and that does give her a sense of peace. I think she really believes that her life is in God’s hands.”

Garcia’s life has been anything but blessed.

By age 16, Garcia had been sexually abused and an alcoholic for years. She became a prostitute, married an Iranian student to keep him in the United States and conceived a daughter. Eleven months after Sarah Swan was born, Garcia suffocated the baby with a plastic bag.

The girl’s death was treated as an accident for years until an arson investigator got Garcia to admit she killed her daughter and set fires near the anniversaries of Sarah Swan’s birth and death.

She and her first husband divorced before she went to prison.

While serving 10 years for the baby’s murder, she married and divorced George Garcia, one of her prostitution customers, then married him again shortly after her March 1991 parole. Court records indicate Garcia physically and sexually abused his wife, and the couple separated a few weeks after the second wedding.

Garcia said she and her 60-year-old husband argued after they met in the parking lot of his suburban Bensenville apartment. She said she shot him in a rage when he told her he gave her money and attention only in return for sex.

Death penalty opponents - among them Bianca Jagger, now a spokeswoman for the human rights group Amnesty International, which opposes capital punishment - say Garcia should be spared, despite her wishes.

“She’s not a heinous criminal,” said Janet Kittlaus of the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. “She’s a person who was a victim herself, and some of these forces she probably couldn’t control.”

Both Garcia and the prosecutors who argued for her execution, however, say the execution opponents are misrepresenting her case.

“I killed George Garcia, and only I know why,” she said in a tape recording made on death row.

While Sister Miriam calls Garcia “a very sensitive, very kind and thoughtful person,” prosecutors say she’s a hardened criminal. She once tied up, robbed and pistol-whipped her first husband, they say.

“She is a walking catalog of crime. She is a criminal storm that affects everyone who comes in her path,” DuPage County prosecutor Thomas Epach said.

The state Prisoner Review Board issues a confidential recommendation to Edgar, who usually announces his decision on clemency the evening before a scheduled execution. Edgar has never granted clemency and last year allowed five executions.

Garcia’s defense lawyer, Manos Kavvidias, said he has unsuccessfully pleaded with his client to reconsider her decision. He said the Illinois Supreme Court’s rejection of her automatic appeal last May “took the wind out of her sails.”

“She didn’t want to drag this out for another five to 13 years,” Kavvidias said.

Sister Miriam said she believes Garcia is remorseful for her crimes.

“She just says her life is in God’s hands, and if it’s her time, she’ll go,” Sister Miriam said. “It puts a finality to all the suffering which she has experienced in her life.”