Andrew Cohen’s Series on Gonzalez
if you have not yet read it, Andrew Cohen’s four-part series on Alberto Gonzalez is a must read, a profile of a dirty, vile, and utterly immoral little man. if it were up to me, Gonzlez would be disbarred, tried for a variety of crimes including malpractice, unlawful execution, violations of ethical standards, and thrown into jail for the rest of his life.
An example (from Part 2, Presidential Enabler):
According to Berlow, Gonzales “repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence” (emphasis in original) in a series of memoranda Gonzales prepared for the governor’s review as part of the state’s clemency process. Berlow believes that this was not mere negligence on the part of Gonzales — that would have been bad enough — but rather part of a concerted effort by both men to ensure for both political and ideological reasons that there would be no clemency petitions granted. The dice were loaded, you might say, by the man who now is the nation’s top lawyer.
In one clemancy case, Berlow accounts, Gonzales failed to include in a memo to Bush the fact that the lawyer for a death row inmate “had literally slept through major portions of the jury selection.” In another case, Gonzales failed to include in a memo to Bush the fact that an important prosecution witness had recanted following trial or that an expert witness vital to the prosecution’s case had been subsequently expelled from the American Psychiatric Association “because his testimony had repeatedly been found to be unethical.” Berlow now tells me that he believes that Gonzales “put the end — execution — above the means, some sort of meaningful clemency review.” This is precisely what Sen. Leahy was talking about when he spoke of Gonzales as a “facilitator” and precisely the opposite of the role the best attorneys general in our history have played.
… and it just gets worse from there.
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