"Torture and Death"

Nat Hentoff on Alberto Gonzales, President Bush’s nominee to replace John Ashcroft as AG:

In the July–August 2003 Atlantic Monthly, Alan Berlow wrote a long, carefully documented article, “The Texas Clemency Memos,” which told of the role of Gonzales, then legal counsel to Texas governor George W. Bush, in deciding the fate of prisoners on death row, including the mentally retarded. Even then, Berlow noted that Gonzales was “widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nominee.” […]

“Based on this information, Bush allowed the execution to proceed in all cases but one.” Berlow says the first 57 of these summaries were written by Gonzales and were Bush’s primary sources of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. “Each is only three to seven pages long. . . . Although the summaries rarely make a recommendation for or against execution, many have a clear prosecutorial bias, and all seem to assume that if an appeals court rejected one or another of the defendant’s claims, there is no conceivable rationale for the governor to revisit that claim.” […]

Gonzales refused to be interviewed for the Atlantic Monthly article. I would expect that a public official of conscience would have wanted to reply to Berlow’s conclusion that “in these documents, Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.” (Emphasis added.)

One of the cases in the article was that of “Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old.” In his three-page report on Terry Washington, Gonzales never mentioned that Washington, as a child, along with his 10 siblings, was “regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts.” And this was “never made known to the jury, although both the district attorney and Washington’s trial lawyer knew of this potentially mitigating evidence.” Just hours after Gonzales’s brief report to Bush, Washington was executed.

In the July 20, 2003, Washington Post, Peter Carlson wrote, “It’s hard not to conclude that both Gonzales and Bush were rather callous, even cavalier, about the most profound decision any government official can make—the decision to kill another human being.” And now Gonzales will be our chief law enforcement officer.

For more of Hentoff on Gonzales, see here.