DETROIT -- What do serial killer Henry Lee Lucas and serial liar Lewis "Scooter" Libby have in common? Both were recipients of President George W. Bush's politically tainted mercy. How do they differ? Lucas was innocent. Libby was guilty.
Bush had no choice with Lucas and grudgingly spared him. Bush chose to spare Libby any jail time to protect his and Vice President Dick Cheney's hides. He gleefully let Libby walk, and it is laughable to think Bush "carefully weighed" the arguments over Cheney's former chief-of-staff's prison sentence, as he cynically claimed.
When Bush learned Libby would be ordered to the slammer while appealing his perjury and obstruction of justice convictions, he acted in a flash, assuring -- as I predicted in a recent column -- that Libby would "never spend a single night in jail."
For Bush and his co-conspirators, Libby locked up and suffering was way too risky, with so many lies and crimes to preserve. Thus, even that single night in jail in Bush world was "excessive" punishment.
As governor of Texas in 1998, Bush was forced to spare Lucas from execution and commute his death sentence to life in prison. Lucas died in 2001. Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox produced indisputable evidence that Lucas was not even in the state at the time of the murder that sent him to death row.
Bush persuaded the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommended the commutation of Lucas' death sentence, and the board dutifully obliged. In another celebrated case I'll get to later, Bush told the pope he lacked such influence with the board. Lucas -- who claimed he was subjected to "coercive interrogation tactics" -- confessed to a slew of murders and other crimes he did not commit. Lucas experienced the "no-brainer" torture that Cheney finds essential to our national security.
Texas cops and prosecutors cleared their unsolved murder files, pinning every rap you could imagine on Lucas, who at one point "confessed" that he took part in about 3,000 murders.
Lucas had murder cases pending in other states, crimes he actually did commit. When his innocence in the Texas case for which he was slated for execution became widely known, a court was sure to prevent that from happening.
But as he approached his presidential campaign and national scrutiny, Bush couldn't escape notice, and commuting the death penalty for Lucas could help polish the Texas governor's phony image as a "compassionate conservative."
During his six years as Texas governor, Bush received 153 petitions for death penalty commutations. Lucas' was the only one he signed. In his typical cocky self-assurance, Bush claimed in his ghosted autobiography, "A Charge to Keep," that he thoroughly reviewed each case and achieved a "fail-safe" method for ensuring "due process" for the condemned.
To think for a minute that Bush pondered and prayed over those facing executions is folly. This is a man whose reckless, impetuous judgments plunged our nation into an unnecessary and unwinnable war in Iraq, costing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives and causing more than 3,600 America troops to die in vain.
Still convinced of the righteousness of the carnage his war unleashed and sustains, Bush is incapable of self-reflection and doubt over his manifest failures and the fiasco in Iraq. Can you imagine the great "decider" fretting about the fate of those on death row in Texas?
Bush's death penalty consigliere while governor of Texas was none other than that shining star of legal probity, our perjury-spewing attorney general, Alberto Gonzales. As the governor's legal counsel, Gonzales "reviewed" clemency appeals and provided Bush with a memo the morning of each execution.
Bush's careful weighing of the death penalty appeals was a sham. Alan Berlow, writing in the July/August 2003 issue of "Atlantic Monthly" magazine, found the memos Bush received to be appallingly inadequate. Assuming Bush read them -- which requires a significant leap of faith -- what he saw was legal and intellectual negligence and malpractice.
Using a Texas Public Information Act, Berlow gained access to 57 of Gonzales' confidential death penalty memos. With people's lives in the balance, Berlow found that "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. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence."
Gonzales lacks intellect, integrity and human decency, but he's made a career out of being Bush's supreme sycophant, a legal harlot willing to sell his soul, to say and do anything to please his pimp. Gonzales knew Bush didn't give a hoot about clemency and acted accordingly.
Sister Helen Prejean, the nun who ministers to death row inmates and whose work became widely known in the film "Dead Man Walking," added to the exposure of Bush's cavalier attitude toward the condemned in a 2005 article in The New York Review of Books titled "Death in Texas"
Sister Helen looked at the case of Terry Washington, a 33-year-old mentally disabled man with the "communication skills of a 7-year-old." Bush was quick to scribble "Deny" on Washington's 1997 clemency petition.
Sister Helen described the shallowness of the review: "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." Washington's brutal beatings as a child and his trial lawyer's negligence were also hidden from the jury and excluded from Bush's memo.
Sister Helen noted, "Gonzales' 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. When Washington's post-conviction lawyers took up his defense, they researched deeply into his childhood and came up with horrifying evidence of abuse. Terry Washington, along with his 10 siblings, had been beaten regularly with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers and fan belts. This was mitigation of the strongest kind, but Washington's jury never heard of it. Nor is there any evidence Gonzales told Bush about it."
Gonzales didn't want to waste Bush's time with such disturbing details, ignoring his responsibility as an officer of the court, and sent a disabled, emotionally traumatized man to death.
Bush's denial of clemency for Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas in more than 100 years, is an egregious example of how cruel, insensitive and barbaric Bush truly is.
By all accounts, Tucker had undergone a remarkable redemption on death row and was a model prisoner. Tucker had killed a man and woman during a drug-induced robbery. During her prison years, Tucker repented, transformed her life and became an inspiration to her fellow prisoners and even her guards.
Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, both death penalty supporters, urged Bush to commute her death sentence. Pope John Paul II wrote an impassioned plea to Bush asking for mercy for Tucker.
Bush responded that he was unable to commute the sentence, helpless without a recommendation from the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole. Bush forgot to tell the pope he controlled the board and it would do anything he wanted.
Bush claimed he was "seeking guidance through prayer." He wrote in this autobiography that Tucker's pending execution "felt like a huge piece of concrete crushing me."
After Tucker's execution, hailed by right-wing lovers of retributive justice, Bush showed his true colors in the case. In an interview on the campaign trail in 1999 with Tucker Carlson, Bush cruelly mimicked Tucker's pleas for mercy.
Mocking her appearance on "Larry King Live," Bush imitated Tucker, pursing his lips and whimpering, "Please, please don't kill me." Few are capable of such inhumanity.
Berlow asked Gonzales if Bush actually read clemency petitions. "From time to time," Gonzales answered. Translation: probably never.
Sister Helen points to Bush's claim in his autobiography that his job was not to "replace the verdict of a jury unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair."
But there were no "new facts or evidence" in Libby's case. He lied to cover up and prevent the further investigation of the underlying crimes Bush and Cheney committed when they ordered the outing of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity.
That was to protect the exposure of the underlying crime of the underlying crime. Plame's husband, former U.S ambassador Joseph Wilson, debunked the hoax that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium in Niger to use for nuclear weapons. That lie was critical in selling the war in Iraq. Using lies to plunge our nation into war is a high crime and misdemeanor, an impeachable offense. It is also treason punishable by the death penalty.
Libby's sentence was commuted, and he is sure to be pardoned to continue to cover up those crimes. Like Henry Lee Lucas, he served Bush's purpose and was spared.
Terry Washington and Karla Faye Tucker also served Bush's political purposes. But they were expendable and unworthy of his vile mercy.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 10 2007 |