The Hill ran an interesting item this week talking about Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and the resume he brings to the 2008 presidential race. There was one tidbit that jumped out at me, as part of the discussion of Bayh’s two terms as a popular governor of a Republican state.
[Doug Richardson, who covered Bayh for several years as a statehouse correspondent for the Associated Press, recalled] that the first time that Bayh signed an execution order “he went through all the records himself” and wrote the convict’s attorney a”10- or 15-page explanation for why he was going to let it go through,” a level of personal attention that Richardson said is rare for other governors.
“Rare” is putting it mildly. I know this is ancient news, but the anecdote reminded me of the callousness a certain Texas governor showed when it came to executing people in his state.
Alan Berlow, for example, wrote an item for The Atlantic a couple of years ago on Alberto Gonzales, now the attorney general, but in the 1990s, Gov. George W. Bush’s chief legal counsel. While Bayh went through documents personally to review a convict’s case before using the death penalty, and even personally wrote explanations for his decisions, Gonzales and Bush dealt with executions differently.
Gonzales declined to be interviewed for this story, but during the 2000 presidential campaign I asked him if Bush ever read the clemency petitions of death-row inmates, and he equivocated. “I wouldn’t say that was done in every case,” he told me. “But if we felt there was something he should look at specifically — yes, he did look from time to time at what had been filed.” I have found no evidence that Gonzales ever sent Bush a clemency petition — or any document — that summarized in a concise and coherent fashion a condemned defendant’s best argument against execution in a case involving serious questions of innocence or due process. Bush relied on Gonzales’s summaries, which never made such arguments.
Did Gonzales reserve the most important issues and documents in the Washington case for a more extensive oral briefing of the governor? Only he and Bush know. It is highly unlikely, however, given that Gonzales usually presented an execution summary to the governor on the day of an execution and that, as he has acknowledged, his briefings typically lasted no more than thirty minutes — far too little time for a serious discussion of a complex clemency plea.
Before becoming president, Bush signed more death warrants than any other elected official alive today in America. Culture of life, indeed.