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Old 12-22-2005, 10:38 AM   #48 (permalink)
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Is this a "rational" view? How does this sentiment help the U.S. seem credible, or even humane....to observers in western Europe, when it comes to the administration of the death penalty? A majority of Texans seem to have a penchant for revenge via state sponsored execution that eclipses the issue of whether those who are guilty are actually the ones who are executed!

Would a German be irrational to form an opinion that America elected a stupid man who was governor of a state filled with stupid people as it's president? What kind of an example do we export when citizens of the state that performs the most executions, set a higher priority on continuing exections, than on insuring that first and foremost.....no one is executed in error in the future?
Quote:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/2898454
Nov. 12, 2004, 10:52PM
Support for the death penalty remains high
<b>But more Texans think the state has executed innocent people</b>

By ANDREW TILGHMAN
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

<b>........Executing the innocent</b>
The number of Texans who believe the state has executed innocent people reached 70 percent this year, compared with 65 percent in 2001. Meanwhile, those who say the state has never wrongly executed someone fell to 15 percent this year, from 21 percent in 2001, according to the poll.

The growing belief in wrongful executions, however, has not affected public support for a moratorium on the death penalty, which some states, including Illinois and Maryland, have imposed to review the fairness of the system.

Fifty-two percent of Texans oppose such a temporary halt to executions while 44 percent support the idea. Those figures are similar to results of a poll in 2002, when 50 percent opposed a moratorium and 41 percent favored it, the Texas Poll said.

Several public officials from Harris County have urged a moratorium on death sentences here because of problems at the Houston Police Department crime lab.

The lab's DNA division was shut down in December 2002 after an independent audit revealed shoddy scientific technique, poorly trained analysts and possible contamination of evidence. Also, police this year discovered 240 mislabeled boxes of evidence affecting some 8,000 investigations.............
Bush's own reputation as the governor who set a record for the number of death warrants that he signed while in that office, along with the track record of he and his attorney general, Gonzales, for secrecy and shoddy review of death penalty cases, further detracts from the image of the U.S. in the eyes of Americans who bother to look into their past performance, as well as to the eyes of those watching in the rest of the world:
Quote:
http://www.bestofaustin.com/issues/d...s_feature.html
HOME: NOVEMBER 7, 2003: POLITICS: CLOSING OPEN RECORDS
What George Bush and Rick Perry don't want you to know
Closing Open Records.......

....In the latest dispute over the Bush papers, however, the president is winning on points. This round began in August, following the publication of an article tracking Gov. Bush's decision-making process that had led to the execution of 151 men and two women during his six-year tenure in Austin. Specifically, reporter Alan Berlow ("The Texas Clemency Memos," The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003) attacked as sloppy and inadequate the work of Bush's briefing attorney and general counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who now holds that same job in the White House. Gonzales is a hot property in D.C., widely considered to be the president's first choice should a vacancy open on the U.S. Supreme Court. (Following Gonzales' stint as general counsel, Bush appointed him to the Texas Supreme Court.) The Atlantic piece was the unofficial beginning of the Gonzales confirmation process, which could be nasty (some conservatives also oppose his nomination because they consider him too liberal). In retrospect, the Atlantic article is also turning out to be a test case on the strength of open records law in Texas........

....... Gov. Bush's daily calendars, also part of the archives -- and still, so far, open to public review -- reflect that Al Gonzales was one of the first faces George W. Bush saw most working mornings in Austin. Gonzales brought with him official documents to be signed, and as general counsel, of course, kept track of executions, including drafting many of the summary memos upon which Bush based his decisions on clemency. (Of 153 requests to Bush for clemency, 152 were denied.) While there haven't been any bombshells out of these files yet, a slow fuse may be burning, in memory of Karla Faye Tucker, executed in 1998. The governor's prolonged public and private deliberations over the fate of Tucker, who became the first woman executed in Texas in a century, brought widespread media attention to Texas and to the governor.

Berlow recounts Gonzales' official memos in the Tucker case, but according to references in the Bush gubernatorial papers, in the course of his research for preparation of his "execution summary" Gonzales also made an unpublicized personal visit to Tucker, in prison at Huntsville. No other documentary evidence of the prison cell visit can apparently be found in the Bush files -- no notes, for example, nor a memorandum of the interview. (In Gov. Bush's file on Tucker, there is, however, a photograph of one of Karla Faye's victims, lying dead with a pickaxe stuck in his chest.) The processing of the papers is not complete, but if the general counsel failed to take notes on a personal interview in a death penalty case, <b>that would lend support to Alan Berlow's argument that the review process -- leading to the execution of 153 people -- was inadequate. ......</b>
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=true
http://archives.lists.indymedia.org/...ly/007205.html
Justice Executed, Texas-Style
Washington Post
July 29, 2003
Author: Peter Carlson; Washington Post Staff Writer

Just for the sake of argument, let's say that killing somebody is a pretty serious matter. And while we're at it, let's go way out on a limb and suggest that killing even a convicted murderer is an act that shouldn't be done without careful consideration of the facts of the case.
George W. Bush believes that. "I take every death penalty case seriously and review each case carefully," he said while governor of Texas.

That sounds reassuring. But a disturbing article in the July-August issue of the Atlantic Monthly suggests that Bush and his legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, exhibited a shocking lack of interest in the facts of the execution cases that came before them.

"During Bush's six years as governor 150 men and two women were executed in Texas -- a record unmatched by any other governor in modern American history," Alan Berlow writes in the article, titled "The Texas Clemency Memos."

During that period, Bush interceded with his Board of Pardons and Paroles to stop just one execution -- that of a serial killer who had been sentenced to die for a murder that two successive state attorneys general concluded he did not commit.

Before each execution -- usually on the very day of the execution -- Gov. Bush received a memo and a half-hour briefing on the case. The first 57 of those memos were prepared by Gonzales, now the White House counsel and a man frequently mentioned as Bush's choice for a seat on the Supreme Court.

Using Texas's Public Information Act, Berlow -- a former NPR correspondent and author of the 1996 book "Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge on the Philippine Island of Negros" -- obtained copies of Gonzales' 57 execution memos. He was, to put it mildly, not impressed.

Using Texas's Public Information Act, Berlow -- a former NPR correspondent and author of the 1996 book "Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge on the Philippine Island of Negros" -- obtained copies of Gonzales' 57 execution memos. He was, to put it mildly, not impressed.

"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," Berlow writes. "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."

Berlow focuses primarily on three cases covered in Gonzales' memos: the controversial executions of Terry Washington, David Wayne Stoker and Billy Conn Gardner.

Washington was convicted of the stabbing murder of a restaurant manager, and apparently there's no doubt about his guilt. But there is also no doubt that he was severely mentally retarded. Gonzales informed Bush of that fact, Berlow writes, "but he didn't mention that Washington's trial lawyer had failed to enlist a mental-health expert to testify on Washington's behalf . . . which in a death penalty case clearly suggests ineffective counsel."

In the Stoker case, Berlow writes, "profound doubts about [his] guilt were raised by the defense but virtually ignored by Gonzales." Among the issues Gonzales didn't bother to mention to Bush: One prosecution witness recanted his testimony; another witness had drug and weapons charges dropped the very day of his testimony; a third had previously been convicted of falsifying evidence.

"All this information was in the public record," Berlow writes, "yet Gonzales mentioned none of it in his memorandum to Bush."

In the Gardner case, Berlow charges, Gonzales did not inform Bush that two witnesses to the shooting had testified that the killer had reddish-blond hair, while Gardner's hair was black. Gonzales also failed to inform Bush that Gardner's lawyer had failed to interview a key witness and had met with the defendant only once -- for 15 minutes -- before jury selection began.

"What Gonzales should have made clear to Bush during the clemency review is that the case involved many unanswered and troubling questions," Berlow writes. "Gardner was put to death on February 16, 1995."

Berlow concentrates on those three cases, but he mentions others in passing: "In his summary of the case of Carl Johnson," Berlow writes, "Gonzales failed to mention that Johnson's trial lawyer had literally slept through major portions of the jury selection."

Gonzales' apparent lack of zeal for delving into the details of these life-and-death cases is doubly distressing because Bush didn't show much interest in them either. Typically, Berlow writes, Gonzales would present his memo on the day of the scheduled execution, then discuss it with Bush for a half-hour later that day.

<b>"Bush's appointment calendar for the morning of Washington's execution," Berlow writes, "shows a half-hour slot marked 'Al G -- Execution.' "</b>

Gonzales seldom made a recommendation in his memos, but in 152 out of 153 cases Bush decided to deny the request for clemency and let the execution proceed.

Gonzales declined to talk to Berlow for the Atlantic article, although the two had previously discussed the clemency process in a 2000 interview. Gonzales also declined to discuss Berlow's article with me. But a White House spokesman referred me to Pete Wassdorf, Gonzales' former deputy counsel, who has written a letter to the editor of the Atlantic, attacking the article as "inaccurate and incomplete" and Berlow as a liberal anti-death-penalty zealot.

"Mr. Berlow's advocacy piece is more at home in his usual places of publication," Wassdorf wrote, such as "Salon.com, which is mostly regarded as a cartoon solely dedicated to Bush Bashing."

Gonzales' memos and half-hour briefings were not the entire clemency process, merely the end of it, Wassdorf says. "Governor Bush's office was fairly informal," Wassdorf wrote in his letter, and "it was not at all unusual after a meeting on a different subject or during an ad hoc meeting to discuss upcoming executions."

Perhaps that's true. But is an informal bull session the best way to delve into the complex details of a murder case?

After reading Berlow's article, and Wassdorf's letter, it's hard not to conclude that both Gonzales and Bush were rather callous, even cavalier, about the most profound decision any government official can make -- the decision to kill another human being.
The Bush administration seems more willing to compromise to "get their man".
Maybe the "all or nothing", unsuccessful attempts to extradite Hamadi from Germany during the Reagan and Bush '41 eras, provided a lesson learned in regard to the political realities concerning attitudes about the death penalty in much of the rest of the world.
Quote:
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/LAW/07/20/einhorn.trial/
Einhorn behind bars in Pennsylvania

July 20, 2001 Posted: 2:38 PM EDT (1838 GMT)

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- American fugitive Ira Einhorn was processed at a state prison near Philadelphia Friday morning, just hours after he arrived from France to face retrial in the death of his girlfriend more than 20 years ago....

...The 61-year-old former anti-war activist was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison in absentia in 1993 for the 1977 beating death of his girlfriend, Helen "Holly" Maddux, whose corpse was found stuffed in a trunk inside a closet of Einhorn's Philadelphia home.

Einhorn can file for a new trial under Pennsylvania law because he was tried in absentia and fled to a country that would not extradite him because of that trial. France would not extradite Einhorn unless Pennsylvania guaranteed his right to a new trial.............

....<b>Einhorn was released to U.S. authorities after the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, was given sufficient guarantees by Pennsylvania authorities that he would get a new trial and not face the death penalty.</b>

Maddux's sister, Buffy Hall, said she was "delighted" Einhorn was back in the United States. She said the family was frustrated and aggravated at Einhorn's behavior while living as a fugitive in France.....
Quote:
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2001/June/253ag.htm
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AG

THURSDAY, JUNE 7, 2001

STATEMENT BY THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
ON JAMES CHARLES KOPP EXTRADITION


"On March 29, James Charles Kopp was arrested in France on federal and state charges in connection with the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian in 1998. Those charges include using deadly force to prevent Dr. Slepian from providing legally available health services and murder.

"Kopp committed a heinous crime that deserves severe punishment. We need to send a strong message that no matter what our differences are, violence is not the solution. The FACE laws were created to ensure that violence against individuals providing legally available health services is not tolerated and will carry a stiff penalty, and I intend to enforce those laws.

"Shortly after the arrest, <b>the French government, pursuant to its law and practice, asked the United States to assure it that the death penalty will not be imposed or carried out.</b> Nevertheless, I have been working to ensure the United States' ability to pursue strong punishment for this terrible crime. I wanted to make sure that our nation would not be constrained by limits placed on Kopp's extradition by France, preventing us from seeking punishment outlined by our laws and our Constitution, such as the death penalty.

<b>"Unfortunately, in order to ensure that Kopp is not released from custody and is brought to justice in America, we have had to agree not to seek the death penalty.</b>

"I share the sentiments of Dr. Slepian's widow, Lynne Slepian, that if the choice is between extraditing Kopp to face these serious charges in a United States court or risking his release by France, the priority must be Kopp's return."
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