Chicago Tribune:
Margaret Chiara, a former U.S. attorney in Grand Rapids, Mich., appealed several times to the Justice Department against having to seek the federal death penalty. In hindsight, for her it was a risky business.
No prisoner has been executed in a Michigan case since 1938, but the Bush administration seemed determined to change that.
Indeed, under Attys. Gen. John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, far more federal defendants have been dispatched to Death Row than under the previous administration. And any prosecutors wishing to do otherwise often find themselves overruled.
The Bush administration has had a long love affair with the death penalty. George W. Bush served only one complete term as Governor of Texas, but his administration allowed 131 prisoners to be put to death. Guilt or innocence seemed to be unimportant.
New York Times:
In one-third of those cases, [a report by the Chicago Tribune] showed, the lawyer who represented the death penalty defendant at trial or on appeal had been or was later disbarred or otherwise sanctioned. In 40 cases the lawyers presented no evidence at all or only one witness at the sentencing phase of the trial.
In 29 cases, the prosecution used testimony from a psychiatrist who -- based on a hypothetical question about the defendant's past -- predicted he would commit future violence. Most of those psychiatrists testified without having examined the defendant: a practice condemned professionally as unethical.
Other witnesses included one who was temporarily released from a psychiatric ward to testify, a pathologist who had admitted faking autopsies and a judge who had been reprimanded for lying about his credentials.
Asked about the Tribune's reporting of his record as governor, Bush said, according to NYT, "'We've adequately answered innocence or guilt' in every case. The defendants, he said, 'had full access to a fair trial.'"
The best case scenario is that Bush and company found capital punishment popular and exploited it to create a 'tough on crime' reputation. The worse case scenario is that they're all a bunch of freakin' psychopaths. But there's no way you can argue that anyone involved in any of this was overly concerned with justice.
And one of the people involved was then-legal counsel to then governor-Bush -- Alberto Gonzales. In an article reviewing memos between Gonzales and Bush regarding death penalty cases, Alan Berlow wrote in The Atlantic that 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." Clearly, the idea was the more executions, the better -- guilt or innocence be damned...
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