Salon: The facilitator (Gonzales)

[kskiska]

When Alberto Gonzales briefed George W. Bush on the cases of Texas death row inmates up for clemency, his memos were so shabby they seemed intended solely to make it easy for Bush to send prisoners to their deaths.

Now that conventional wisdom has focused attention on "moral values" as our paramount national concern, it might be worth spending a few minutes considering how President Bush's nominee for attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, dealt with one of those values -- human life -- on 57 occasions.

(snip)

In addition to questioning Gonzales about when he thinks it's appropriate to torture people, Judiciary Committee members might want to ask Gonzales when he thinks it's appropriate to kill them. A sizable body of evidence on that subject has been extracted from the Texas State Archives, the repository of the gubernatorial records of George W. Bush, and these documents suggest that Gonzales didn't give the subject the kind of thought one might expect of a man burdened with a mantle of moral values. As governor of Texas, Bush acted as the court of last resort for 153 men and women, the last public official standing between them and the executioner. On 152 occasions Bush opted for death, and for 57 of those decisions he relied almost exclusively on briefings prepared by Gonzales -- briefings that appear to have been designed, above all, to facilitate the governor's predisposition for execution.

(snip)

We now know that Bush's repeated assurances of certainty and thoroughness were patently untrue. And we have more than a modicum of certainty about this because we have access to Bush's daily appointment logs -- which show that he rarely spent more than 30 minutes on an execution briefing -- and we have Gonzales' own files, which show that he did not send Bush a clemency petition laying out a defendant's best arguments for a pardon on even one occasion. Most important, we have Gonzales' actual execution case summaries on which Bush relied in making his decisions to proceed with more than 99 percent of the death warrants that landed on his desk.

Gonzales' memos, running anywhere from three to seven pages, are, in many cases, so slapdash, incomplete and inaccurate that no one relying on them could possibly make a fair, balanced and intelligent decision as to whether clemency should have been a consideration. Anyone relying solely on Gonzales' briefings would have probably done exactly what Bush did -- put a little black check next to the word "Deny" at the end of the summary and send the offender to his death. True, Gonzales and his staff of lawyers were handling an unprecedented number of executions. But Gonzales' omissions appear less the oversights of overworked attorneys than the deliberate design of a lawyer who knew what his client wanted -- an open-and-shut argument for execution -- and was all too happy to deliver.

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/01/06/gonzales_death/