Yet in Washington's case there was a sizable body of evidence the jury never heard, which should have made it glaringly obvious that Washington's trial met even the most conservative definition of unfairness. Jurors weren't told that Washington was mentally retarded and brain damaged, that as a child he and his 10 siblings were repeatedly whipped with water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers and automobile fan belts. Gonzales apparently concluded that this evidence was insignificant, because he didn't bother to mention it in the summary he prepared for Bush. Instead he wrongly suggested that there was "conflicting information" about Washington's mental state. Gonzales also didn't bother to mention Washington's forceful claim of ineffective counsel, arising from his attorney's failure first to present jurors with the mitigating evidence of Washington's childhood abuse and mental retardation and, second, to call a mental health expert to testify to these facts.
Indeed, "ineffective" or "incompetent" counsel would be an accurate description of Gonzales, whose execution summaries repeatedly failed to mention the most salient claims of defendants. Consider, for example, these four cases not previously reported:
In his summary of the Karl Hammond case, Gonzales notes that the defendant had petitioned for a reprieve, but doesn't bother to tell Bush any of the arguments for reprieve. In a draft of his summary Gonzales noted that Hammond denied his guilt, but this claim was dropped from the summary submitted to Bush. Instead, Gonzales quotes the prosecutor, stating "that there is absolutely no doubt in his mind that Karl Hammond committed the offenses..."
Gonzales notes that a special master was appointed to investigate the case of Anthony Ray Westley, but never mentions that this official concluded that Westley was not the shooter and that "a breakdown of the adversarial process" occurred in the case due to the incompetent representation by Westley's attorney. Nor does Gonzales mention that Westley's co-defendant did not get a death sentence and that the state used conflicting arguments in prosecuting the two defendants, arguing at each man's trial that only he could have been the gunman.
The state of Texas used the same tactic at the trial of Willie Ray Williams, insisting he was the shooter in the death of Claude Shaffer, then turned around and argued at the trial of Williams' co-defendant, Joseph Nichols, that "Willie could not have shot" the victim and that only Nichols could have been the killer. Gonzales makes no mention of this.
The execution summary for Davis Losada makes no mention of Losada's questionable legal representation or of the fact that Losada's attorney had an obvious conflict of interest, having earlier represented the chief witness against Losada. Gonzales does report that as of the morning of the scheduled execution, Losada had no legal counsel. If Gonzales saw anything inappropriate about that he does not mention it.
Three other cases demonstrate equally egregious reporting by Gonzales:
In the Billy Conn Gardner case, Gonzales doesn't mention that Gardner did not match the description of the suspect given by the victim and other eyewitnesses, or that Gardner had been fingered by one Melvin Sanders, who received immunity from prosecution in connection with the murder and other pending felonies. Nor does he mention that Sanders' wife, Paula, had received immunity and that Paula, who was sitting next to the victim at the time of the murder, did not identify Gardner, whom she knew, as the assailant. Gonzales fails to report that Paula was almost certainly complicit in the robbery that precipitated the murder and that she was never interviewed by Gardner's attorney, who met with Gardner for only 15 minutes before jury selection in his murder trial began.
In the case of Carl Johnson, Gonzales doesn't mention that the defendant's attorney slept through major portions of his trial.
When the case of Bruce Edwin Callins went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1994, Justice Harry Blackmun, a longtime supporter of the death penalty, wrote a historic dissent in which he concluded that the death penalty was unconstitutional. "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death," Blackmun wrote. "I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies." One need not agree with Blackmun's conclusion to appreciate that this was a monumental ruling and that Blackmun was directing his comments to those, like Bush, who held decisions over life and death at their fingertips. Yet Gonzales doesn't even mention Blackmun's opinion in the summary of the Callins case he prepared for Bush.
Without question, all these men were sentenced to die for committing horrible crimes. And it is easy to imagine how Bush or Gonzales or anyone who takes the time to review the endlessly horrifying details of dozens of homicide files might become cynical about the idea of granting even a single pardon. The rogues' gallery of miscreants and the roster of innocent victims tend to drain sympathy. Among those approved for lethal injection by Bush were Samuel Hawkins, who confessed to 25 rapes and was guilty of two murders; Ricky Lee Green, who killed four people and castrated one of his victims after having sex with him; cop-killer Patrick Fitzgerald Rogers; and Kenneth Granviel, who murdered 2-year-old Natasha McClenton and sexually assaulted and murdered four of her relatives in their Fort Worth apartment. Then there was James Carl Lee Davis, who murdered his 15-year-old neighbor after raping her and beating and sodomizing her with a pipe, and John Cockrum, who had shot and killed his father when he was 17 but was executed for the murder and robbery of 69-year-old Eva May.
