The Texas love affair with capital punishment.

[Cyrano]

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow?pid=221949

In three weeks, Texas is going to murder an African American man named Kenneth Foster under an insane law. (See above link.) Foster let a friend out of his car, not having any idea that his friend was about to have a run in with someone and then murder him.

However, under Texas law, Foster, who was nothing more than an innocent witness, has become an aider and abettor of the murderer. And Texas is now going to murder him.

(In the movie "Thelma and Louise," Susan Sarandon insisted that they were going to get to Mexico without going through Texas. She told Geena Davis that she had no intention of setting foot in that state. At the end, they drive into the Grand Canyon, and I for one, think that a better fate than ending up in Texas.)

But back to the main point. The murder rate in the U.S. has been on the upswing for years. And as far as I'm concerned, those who passed, support and carry out Texas "justice" in the form of capital punishment are among those who are adding to this murder rate.

I'm not certain, but I think that George W. Bush (while governor of Texas) was responsible for more executions than any governor in history. What a disgrace.

[Ilsa]

1. With the help of Fredo.

The Texas Clemency Memos

As the legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales—now the White House counsel, and widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nominee—prepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda for Bush's review. Never before discussed publicly, the memoranda suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand.

snip

n the morning of May 6, 1997, Governor George W. Bush signed his name to a confidential three-page memorandum from his legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and placed a bold black check mark next to a single word: DENY. It was the twenty-ninth time a death-row inmate's plea for clemency had been denied in the twenty-eight months since Bush had been sworn in. In this case Bush's signature led, shortly after 6:00 P.M. on the very same day, to the execution of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old.

Washington's death was barely noted by the media, and the governor's office issued no statement about it. But the execution and the three-page memo that sealed Washington's fate—along with dozens of similar memoranda prepared for Bush—speak volumes about the way the clemency process was approached both by Bush and by Gonzales, the man most often mentioned as the President's choice for the next available seat on the Supreme Court.

snip

Gonzales's summaries were Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant's personal background, and a condensed legal history. 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 a defendant's claims, there is no conceivable rationale for the governor to revisit that claim. This assumption ignores one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes.

A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, 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.

snip

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200307/berlow

On edit: July 2003