The Washington Post has con­duct­ed fur­ther research into the clemen­cy mem­os pre­pared by U.S. Attorney General nom­i­nee Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as lead coun­sel to then-Governor George W. Bush in Texas. Gonzales craft­ed 62 mem­os regard­ing clemen­cy requests from Texas death row inmates, and sev­er­al Texas attor­neys have voiced their crit­i­cisms that the clemen­cy mem­os con­tained incom­plete and unfair sum­maries of evi­dence and mit­i­gat­ing cir­cum­stances. The mem­os, first reviewed in 2003 by inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Alan Berlow for The Atlantic Monthly con­tained Gonzales’s rec­om­men­da­tions for each upcom­ing exe­cu­tion and result­ed in Bush’s denial of clemen­cy in all but one instance between January 1995 and November 1997. In one memo writ­ten about the case of Henry Lee Lucas, Gonzales failed to men­tion that a 1986 inves­ti­ga­tion by the Texas attor­ney gen­er­al’s office con­clud­ed that Lucas had false­ly con­fessed to numer­ous mur­ders and had not killed the vic­tim in the crime for which he was to be exe­cut­ed. “[I]t does not real­ly address in any way…all the ques­tions that were raised about his guilt,” said for­mer Texas attor­ney gen­er­al Jim Mattox after review­ing the Lucas clemen­cy memo writ­ten by Gonzales.

In the case of Kenneth Ray Ransom, defense attor­ney Jim Marcus believes the memo giv­en to Bush failed to cor­rect­ly state the basis for Ransom’s clemen­cy request. Marcus notes, ​“Had I known that the 40-page peti­tion I filed would be boiled down to one slip­shod sen­tence in Mr. Gonzales’s memo, I would sim­ply have filed a one-sen­tence peti­tion.” Defense attor­ney David Herman stat­ed that Gonzales’s sum­ma­ry of Jack Strickland’s case failed to accu­rate­ly address ques­tions about Strickland’s men­tal com­pe­ten­cy and was ​“a skele­tal attempt to brief Bush on a com­plex case.” Another Texas defense attor­ney, Greg Wiercioch, said that for two of his death row clients, appel­late courts grant­ed stays of exe­cu­tion or ordered addi­tion­al evi­den­tiary hear­ings after Gonzales had declared in his mem­os that the case had no wor­thy pend­ing legal issues. (The Washington Post, January 6, 2005). See Clemency.

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