From 1995 to 1997, Gonzales acted as his [Bush's -- sid] legal counsel when the then-Governor decided whether to grant clemency, or to allow the executions to go forward. What kind of counsel did Gonzales provide? According to Berlow[*], he "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."
Berlow writes that the memos reflect "an extraordinarily narrow notion of clemency." They appear to have excluded, for instance, factors such as "mental illness or incompetence, childhood physical or sexual abuse, remorse, rehabilitation, racial discrimination in jury selection, the competence of the legal defense, or disparities in sentences between co-defendants or among defendants convicted of similar crimes."
Take the case of Terry Washington, a thirty-three-year-old mentally retarded man with the communications skills of a seven-year-old executed in 1997. Gonzales's clemency memo, according to Berlow, did not even mention his mental retardation, or his lawyer's failure to call, at trial, for the testimony of a mental health expert on this issue. Nor did it mention that the jury never heard about Washington's history of child abuse; he was one of ten children, all of whom "were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts."
Execution of the mentally retarded was already under a shadow at that point - a shadow has only deepened over the ensuing years. In 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, a majority of the Supreme Court held - too late for Washington - that executing the mentally retarded is "cruel and unusual" punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
* The memos are unpublished, but were reviewed by Berlow in The Atlantic Monthly.
No comments:
Post a Comment