The Daily Background

From the joint, or at least tangentially related departments of Alberto Gonzales Out of Control and Unintended Patriot Act Consequences comes this:

The Justice Department is putting the final touches on regulations that could give Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales important new sway over death penalty cases in California and other states, including the power to shorten the time that death row inmates have to appeal convictions to federal courts.

The rules implement a little-noticed provision in last year’s reauthorization of the Patriot Act that gives the attorney general the power to decide whether individual states are providing adequate counsel for defendants in death penalty cases. The authority has been held by federal judges.

Apparently, and nobody noticed this when the Act was up for renewal, the Patriot act gives Gonzales the power of an all-powerful judge. He can essentially say at his own discretion “you don’t have the right to an appeal” to an inmate on death row and thus speed up their execution. This comes as an apparent reaction to the fact that the public debate over the death penalty has increased in recent years, and the rate of executions has declined.

The move to shorten the appeals process and effectively speed up executions comes at a time of growing national concern about the fairness of the death penalty, underscored by the use of DNA testing to establish the innocence of more than a dozen death row inmates in recent years.
[…]
“It is another means by which people are determined to shut the federal courts down to meaningful review of death penalty cases,” said Elisabeth Semel, director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the UC Berkeley law school. “The inevitable result of speeding them up is to miss profound legal errors that are made. Lawyers will not see them. Courts will not address them.”

“This is the Bush administration throwing down the gauntlet and saying, ‘We are going to speed up executions,’ ” said Kathryn Kase, a Houston lawyer and co-chair of the death-penalty committee for the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Bush is, of course, the death penalty president, and Gonzales was a judge from Texas, where most people are executed. Does this come as a surprise to anyone that this is happening?

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