 In 1999, both Fischer and Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin appealed for clemency for the LaGrand brothers, two German citizens sentenced to death in Arizona.According to the German government, the LaGrands had been denied their rights as German citizens because prosecutors did not inform the German consulate of the brothers' arrest in 1982 until a decade later.However, both were put to death in a cloud of cyanide gas.