“I don’t believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair.” -George W. Bush, in his autobiography A Charge to Keep

Yesterday, George Bush commuted ex-Dick Cheney Chief of Staff Scooter Libby’s 30 month prison conviction so he will not have to serve a day of jail time for obstructing justice in the investigation into leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name to reporters.

Libby was, of course, procecuted by a Bush appointed U.S. attorney, convicted by a jury, sentenced by a Republican appointed judge, and had his appeal denied by a three judge panel that included Republican appointed judges, and handed down a sentence which thousands of other people around the country have received for the exact same crime.

Yet Bush decided that justice had not been fairly handed down and declared that the punishment was “excessive.” Of course this is a man not known for his leniency.

Before he was President, Governor George W. Bush’s most famous achievement was presiding over 152 executions in Texas–a modern record for governors. Knowing now that Bush agonizes over sentences just like the Scooter Libby one, it is strange to wonder why in Texas he only commuted one death sentence in his 28 months as governor. It seems within 152 executions W. might have been able to find some that were “excessive,” just like in Scooter Libby’s case. Maybe some where the defendant couldn’t afford the best attorneys in the world like Libby, or where the prosecutor, judge, or jury may have acted improperly, unlike the Libby case. Maybe in a case like this, from the NYT:

Take, for example, the case of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded man of thirty-three with the communication skills of a seven-year-old. Washington’s plea for clemency came before Governor Bush on the morning of May 6, 1997. After a thirty-minute briefing by Gonzales, Bush checked “Deny”— just as he had denied twenty-nine other pleas for clemency in his first twenty-eight months as governor.

Bush did not take into account how Washington was “regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts” as a child. Or “that Washington’s trial lawyer had failed to enlist a mental-health expert to testify on Washington’s behalf (although he was entitled to one under a 1985 Supreme Court ruling).”

Notice that in the above excerpt, “Gonzales” refers to Alberto Gonzales, the current Attorney General, who, at the time, also wrote up summaries for Bush about Death Row inmates on the day they would be executed. The reason Bush did not take those facts into account was because Gonzales did not put them into his report. Not that it would have mattered in most cases, as Alan Berlow of Atlantic Monthly pointed out:

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.”

He goes on to say…

Gonzales’s summaries were Bush’s primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant’s personal background, and a condensed legal history.

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 the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.

So basically, Bush would “agonize” over a man’s life for a half hour or less, using a summary that included nothing about the possibility of innocence or impropriety, refused in most cases to even read the clemency petition and then signed off on the man in question’s execution.

Cut back to yesterday when Bush released his statement regarding the commuting of Scooter Libby’s sentence. He says, “In preparing for the decision I am announcing today, I have carefully weighed these arguments and the circumstances surrounding this case.”

I wonder if he considered the Libby case the same way?

Trevor Timm is a Blast Magazine staff writer