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.