Alberto R. Gonzales, no mind of his own Pt.2

We have seen that George W. Bush is lazy and intellectually incurious. He only wants good news, Bush only wants information that confirms his preconceived notions, no facts please. The Attorney General nominee, Alberto Gonzales, has built a career on enabling George W. Bush's tendency to avoid the facts of issues. Most of the attention has been directed toward the torture memos. A few days ago we had a post on Gonzales' involvement in Texas death penalty cases while Bush was Governor. Bill in DC has sent us this WAPO article on the clemency memos prepared by Gonzales in Texas.

In 1995, a one-eyed drifter named Henry Lee Lucas was headed for execution by injection in a Texas prison for the murder of an unnamed woman, one of hundreds he confessed to killing in a crime spree lasting more than a decade.

The task of recommending whether then-Gov. George W. Bush should grant a reprieve or commute Lucas's death sentence fell to Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush's counsel. In a memo to Bush dated March 13, 1995, Gonzales marshaled a case for Lucas's guilt. He noted that Lucas had given a sheriff a drawing of the victim, and attached a record of Lucas's eight other Texas murder convictions, each of which led to lengthy or life prison sentences.

Left out of Gonzales's summary was any mention of a 1986 investigation by the Texas attorney general's office that concluded that Lucas had not killed the woman, and that he had falsely confessed to numerous killings in an effort to undermine the veracity of his confessions to the crimes he did commit.

While the six-page memo factually summarizes Lucas's court appeals, "it does not really address in any way . . . all the questions that were raised about his guilt," said Jim Mattox, the Texas attorney general from 1983 to 1991, who instigated an investigation of police conduct in the case. He said that if the memo had been prepared for him, he would have chastised the author "for allowing me to make a decision on partial information."

I guess the question here is was Gonzales just sloppy or was he trying to protect his boss from unpleasant facts? It really doesn't matter, either one should make him an unacceptable candidate for the nations highest law official.