Is Alberto Gonzales god or the devil in a dark blue suit?

By
Max
J. Castro                                                                  Read Spanish Version
majcastro@gmail.com

From
the Washington
Post,
August 15, 2007: “Gonzales to get Power in Death Penalty Cases.”

Add
this one to the long string of surreal headlines that have come out
of the Bush administration.

It
sounds like a bad joke but it is not. The U.S. Department of Justice,
which Gonzales runs, and which he nearly has run into the ground, is
preparing regulations under which the Attorney General would have the
authority to approve “fast-track” procedures adopted by states
who want to carry out executions at a faster rate and with fewer
appeals.

The
man who will be handed such awesome power, thanks to President Bush
and by virtue of one of the many troubling provisions of the Patriot
Act, was the same who thought that the protections against abuse and
torture enshrined in the Geneva Conventions were quaint. He is the
man who oversaw the decimation of the Constitutional rights of
Americans. He is the official who presided over the wholesale firing
of U.S. Attorneys for ideological and political reasons. He is a man
who seems incapable of ever telling “the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth” — even to Congress.

The
prospect that Alberto Gonzales will be given expanded powers over
life and death is chilling for a reason beyond the scandals he has
recently being embroiled in and the outrages he has perpetrated in
his current office. That reason is what Alberto Gonzales did the last
time he was given this kind of power. And that was to act as a serial
enabler for Bush and the state of Texas to carry out wholesale
executions — to the point of disregarding serious questions about
due process, fairness, mercy, or even innocence.

It
happened in the late 1990s when Gonzales was the Attorney General of
Texas and George W. Bush was governor of that state. The story is
laid out in an excellent article (“The Texas Clemency Memos)” by
Alan Berlow in the July/August 2003 issue of the Atlantic
Monthly
(www.theatlantic.com/200307/berlow).
The following are verbatim quotations from Berlow’s piece
(quotation marks omitted):

• During
  Bush’s six years as governor 150 men and two women were executed
  in Texas — a record unmatched by any governor in modern American
  history.

• Each
  time a person was sentenced to death, Bush received from his legal
  counsel a document summarizing the facts of the case, usually on the
  morning of the day scheduled for execution, and was then briefed on
  those facts by his counsel.

• Based
  on this information Bush allowed the execution to proceed in all
  cases but one.

• The
  first fifty-seven of these summaries were prepared by Gonzales.

• Gonzales’s
  summaries were Bush’s primary source of information in deciding on
  whether someone would live or die… A close examination of the
  Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved
  executions based on the most cursory briefings of the issues in
  dispute.

• I
  have found no evidence that Gonzales ever sent Bush a clemency
  petition — or any document — that summarized in a concise and
  coherent fashion a condemned defendant’s best argument against
  execution in a case involving serious questions of innocence and due
  process.

Gonzales
and Bush turned the clemency process into a sham. It was a foregone
conclusion that anybody sentenced to death should die, even a
mentally retarded person, or one whose counsel was incompetent, or
someone who suffered from serious abuse during childhood. The one
case in which Bush commuted a death sentence was the case of a man
scheduled to die for a crime committed when the condemned man was not
even in the state.

Berlow
points out that turning clemency into a charade is especially serious
in a state such as Texas, where a third of executions taking place in
the United States since 1976 have occurred, and where the justice
system is plagued with bias and incompetence. 

But
the point is not due process or even justice. The point, for Gonzales
and for his boss George W. Bush, in Texas then and in the nation now,
is to lubricate and hone the machinery of execution so that it may
function with the speed and power of a NASCAR racing car, the better
to posture as tough on crime, the better to please the bloodthirsty
constituency that, then and now, are the most fervent supporters of
our “compassionate conservative” president.