As if torture weren't enough
Jan. 6th, 2005 12:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumWho thinks I might be willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Good Ol' Bertie Gonzales?
No one? Well perhaps I am being unfair. Maybe he was just too busy with unknown things as Bush's Whute House Counsel to read the memoranda he signed (or perhaps he has an autopen) in which case he isn't guilty of actually supporting torture, just of misfeasance.
So maybe, with a mmore weighty office he'll be more attentive, and that means we ought to give him another bite at the apple of public office.
Nope. He has a track record, and it ain't good.
I am not, per se, against killing people (heck, I take a pittance of your tax dollars to do it, so being dead set against it would seem hypocritical). I am against the state doing it, because the state can't do it fairly.
But Gonzales... he is all for it (along with Scalia, which means his priest ought to refuse him communion... he hasn't made the distancing step that Kerry did, nope Scalia has said the more Christian a country is, the more capital punishments it will carry out). How much is Gonzo for it?
Enough that when evidence of non-guilt was presented to him, he chose to leave it out of his review of at least one petition for clemency.
The Washington Post says Gonzales's Clemency Memos Criticized (registration required). Some excerpts.
In 1995, a one-eyed drifter named Henry Lee Lucas was headed for execution by injection in a Texas prison for the murder of an unnamed woman, one of hundreds he confessed to killing in a crime spree lasting more than a decade.
The task of recommending whether then-Gov. George W. Bush should grant a reprieve or commute Lucas's death sentence fell to Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush's counsel. In a memo to Bush dated March 13, 1995, Gonzales marshaled a case for Lucas's guilt. He noted that Lucas had given a sheriff a drawing of the victim, and attached a record of Lucas's eight other Texas murder convictions, each of which led to lengthy or life prison sentences.
Left out of Gonzales's summary was any mention of a 1986 investigation by the Texas attorney general's office that concluded that Lucas had not killed the woman, and that he had falsely confessed to numerous killings in an effort to undermine the veracity of his confessions to the crimes he did commit.
While the six-page memo factually summarizes Lucas's court appeals, "it does not really address in any way . . . all the questions that were raised about his guilt," said Jim Mattox, the Texas attorney general from 1983 to 1991, who instigated an investigation of police conduct in the case.
...
White House spokesman Brian R. Besanceney said in response to the complaints yesterday that Gonzales and his colleagues in the Texas counsel's office "treated each clemency petition with careful scrutiny and sensitivity." He also said the summaries Gonzales prepared represented "a small fraction of the information provided to the governor" and sought only to document "the governor's final decision" rather than recommend a course of action.
Pete Wassdorf, head of the general counsel's office for the Texas attorney general, who served as Gonzales's deputy at the time, also said additional information about some of the cases was provided to Bush in other documents. But only a few of the 62 clemency memos Gonzales prepared for Bush between January 1995 and November 1997 make any reference to additional documentation.
This is the level of care we see in matters of life and death... how much can we expect in lesser matters?
No one? Well perhaps I am being unfair. Maybe he was just too busy with unknown things as Bush's Whute House Counsel to read the memoranda he signed (or perhaps he has an autopen) in which case he isn't guilty of actually supporting torture, just of misfeasance.
So maybe, with a mmore weighty office he'll be more attentive, and that means we ought to give him another bite at the apple of public office.
Nope. He has a track record, and it ain't good.
I am not, per se, against killing people (heck, I take a pittance of your tax dollars to do it, so being dead set against it would seem hypocritical). I am against the state doing it, because the state can't do it fairly.
But Gonzales... he is all for it (along with Scalia, which means his priest ought to refuse him communion... he hasn't made the distancing step that Kerry did, nope Scalia has said the more Christian a country is, the more capital punishments it will carry out). How much is Gonzo for it?
Enough that when evidence of non-guilt was presented to him, he chose to leave it out of his review of at least one petition for clemency.
The Washington Post says Gonzales's Clemency Memos Criticized (registration required). Some excerpts.
In 1995, a one-eyed drifter named Henry Lee Lucas was headed for execution by injection in a Texas prison for the murder of an unnamed woman, one of hundreds he confessed to killing in a crime spree lasting more than a decade.
The task of recommending whether then-Gov. George W. Bush should grant a reprieve or commute Lucas's death sentence fell to Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush's counsel. In a memo to Bush dated March 13, 1995, Gonzales marshaled a case for Lucas's guilt. He noted that Lucas had given a sheriff a drawing of the victim, and attached a record of Lucas's eight other Texas murder convictions, each of which led to lengthy or life prison sentences.
Left out of Gonzales's summary was any mention of a 1986 investigation by the Texas attorney general's office that concluded that Lucas had not killed the woman, and that he had falsely confessed to numerous killings in an effort to undermine the veracity of his confessions to the crimes he did commit.
While the six-page memo factually summarizes Lucas's court appeals, "it does not really address in any way . . . all the questions that were raised about his guilt," said Jim Mattox, the Texas attorney general from 1983 to 1991, who instigated an investigation of police conduct in the case.
...
White House spokesman Brian R. Besanceney said in response to the complaints yesterday that Gonzales and his colleagues in the Texas counsel's office "treated each clemency petition with careful scrutiny and sensitivity." He also said the summaries Gonzales prepared represented "a small fraction of the information provided to the governor" and sought only to document "the governor's final decision" rather than recommend a course of action.
Pete Wassdorf, head of the general counsel's office for the Texas attorney general, who served as Gonzales's deputy at the time, also said additional information about some of the cases was provided to Bush in other documents. But only a few of the 62 clemency memos Gonzales prepared for Bush between January 1995 and November 1997 make any reference to additional documentation.
This is the level of care we see in matters of life and death... how much can we expect in lesser matters?
