Death Penalty Errors Raise New Questions

27 January 2005 |permalink | email article

Helen Prejean’s new book focuses on death penalty errors. . . Gonzales’s Texas counsel to W raises new questions.

Sister Helen Prejean became the nation’s leading advocate against the death penalty with her 1993 national bestseller, “Dead Man Walking” in which she described how experiences in counseling death row inmates transformed her. Her thesis then was that it’s morally wrong for the state to execute its citizens. In “Death of Innocents,” her new book being published by Random House this month, Prejean argues that it is even more of a moral transgression for the state to execute the innocent based on death penalty errors. While it ranks low on domestic and foreign policy issues of concern to Americans, this book takes the debate on the death penalty to the next level. It also raises new questions about the fitness of Alberto R. Gonzales to be confirmed as attorney general.

The Los Angeles Times (Jan. 26) published an interview with Prejean hours after the state of California recently executed a 61-year-old triple murderer in which the Roman Catholic nun said she hoped the new book would take a closer look at the reliability of the judicial process based on a finality which is supreme and which varies with geography. “We need to be angry,” she said. “Don’t think that the death penalty is a peripheral moral issue about what to do with a few bad criminals. It hits all the wounds that are present in our American life. There’s racism in it. In the assaults on the poor that are made to bear the burden.”

Prejean wrote a stunning article, “Death in Texas,” for The New York Review of Books (Jan. 13) which was adapted from her new book. She notes that in his six years as Texas governor, George W. Bush presided over 152 executions, more than any governor in recent U.S. history. She cites this quote from his autobiography, “A Charge to Keep (1999): “I take every death penalty case seriously and review each case carefully…” Bush called his review process a “fail-safe” method for ensuring “due process” and certainty of guilt.

But Prejean writes that an image of Bush as a fair-minded governor might have succeeded “if the journalist Alan Berlow has not used the Public Information Act to gain access to fifty-seven confidential death penalty memos that Bush’s then legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, presented to
him, usually on the very day of execution. The reports could not have been more cursory. Take, for example, the case of Terry Washington, a
mentally retarded man of thirty-three with the communication skills of a seven-year old. Washington’s plea for clemency came before Governor Bush on the morning of May 6, 1997. After a thirty-minute briefing by Gonzales, Bush checked ‘Deny’ - just as he had denied twenty-nine other pleas for clemency in his first twenty-eight months as governor.”

Prejean’s article adds that “Washington’s plea for clemency raised substantial issues, which called for thoughtful, fair-minded consideration, not the least of which was the fact that Washington’s mental handicap had never been presented to the jury that condemned him to death. Gonzales’s legal summary, however, omitted any mention of Washington’s mental limitations as well as the fact that his trial lawyer had failed to enlist the help of a mental health expert to testify on his client’s behalf.” In another excerpt, Prejean writes that “when Berlow asked Gonzalez directly whether Bush ever read the clemency petitions, he replied that he ‘did from time to time.’ Instead, Bush seems to have relied on Gonzalez’s summaries, and they clearly indicate that Gonzalez continuously sides with prosecutors…”

Prejean’s book, another best seller, will touch off a fresh round of moral discussion on the death penalty. Gonzalez, who goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, is already under heavy fire for parsing the definition of torture. Allegations of his shoddy performance in mishandling Texas death penalty clemency petitions hurt his credibility as a fair and impartial nominee for attorney general.

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