Alberto Gonzales - Counsel To Governor Bush

Counsel To Governor Bush

As counsel to Governor Bush, Gonzales helped advise Bush in connection with jury duty when he was called in a 1996 Travis County drunk driving case. The case led to controversy during Bush's 2000 presidential campaign because Bush's answers to the potential juror questionnaire did not disclose Bush's own 1976 misdemeanor drunk driving conviction. Gonzales made no formal request for Bush to be excused from jury duty (to the contrary, Gonzales made it clear Bush was ready to serve as a juror), however, he did raise a possible conflict of interest because as the Governor, Bush might be called upon to pardon the accused in the case. The defense counsel has stated he had already thought of this conflict of interest problem for his client and had planned on his own to ask the judge to strike Bush from the jury. Nonetheless, Texas Monthly described Gonzales’ work here as “canny lawyering”.

As Governor Bush's counsel in Texas, Gonzales also reviewed all clemency requests. A 2003 article in The Atlantic Monthly asserts that Gonzales gave insufficient counsel, and failed to second-guess convictions and failed appeals. The White House said the executive summaries prepared represented a small fraction of information provided to the Governor and sought only to document the governor’s final decisions rather than recommend a course of action. Pete Wassdorf, head of the General Counsel’s office for the Texas Attorney General, who served as Gonzales’ deputy at the time, also said additional information about some of the cases was provided to Bush in other documents. Under Section II, Article 4 of the Texas Constitution, the Governor cannot grant a pardon or commute a death sentence except with a majority vote recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, so Bush was constrained in granting clemency even if he had wanted to do so in a case. Only one death sentence was overturned by Governor Bush, and the state of Texas executed more prisoners during Gonzales's term than any other state. Gonzales’ deputy general counsel from 1995 to 1999, Pete Wassdorf, wrote that The Atlantic Monthly story written by Berlow paints an inaccurate and incomplete picture of the clemency process under Bush. Wassdorf, who served with General Gonzales’s office during the period of the clemency memo wrote: “Berlow also fails to recognize that according to American jurisprudence, clemency is a discretionary act of grace bestowed by the governor under the state’s constitution. It is not part of the judicial process. If the governor chooses never to grant clemency; or to exercise that constitutional authority sparingly, and then only when legitimate questions about guilt or innocence persist or when legal issues are raised that have not been reviewed by the courts, or to grant it in every case, he may clearly do so. Governor Bush took a consistent, principled position on clemency, and Gonzales’ counsel served his client well by bringing all credible matters raised by the condemned to the Governor’s attention. The fact that the author disagrees with the governor’s standards does not make them wrong; nor does it make Gonzales’ summaries deficient. Finally, I want to state for the record that the general counsel’s office approved each of these cases with the greatest of care and sensitivity. I categorically disagree with any suggestions otherwise.”