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| University of D.C. Should Cancel Honorary Degree for Attorney General Gonzales. |
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D.C. Statehood Green Party Friday, April 29, 2005 Contact: Statehood Greens cite racial disparities and rejection of clemency pleas in Texas executions while Gonzales was legal counsel to Gov. Bush, Gonzales's positions on torture, international law, and presidential power to deny due process. WASHINGTON, D.C. -- D.C. Statehood Green Party leaders are urging University of the District of Columbia (UDC) officials to reconsider plans to give Attorney General Alberto Gonzales an honorary degree on graduation day. UDC graduation day will take place Saturday, May 14 at MCI Arena in downtown Washington, D.C. "An honorary degree for this enabler of injustice and legalized murder would insult UDC students and alumni, D.C.'s majority black population, and all people who value justice," said Rick Tingling-Clemmons, at-large member of the Statehood Green Party's Steering Committee and a UDC alumnus (undergraduate and graduate). "It would turn an award for legal accomplishment into an award for racially biased policies, recklessly applied death sentences, abuse of power, and contempt for the rule of constitutional and international law." "Our demand for UDC administrators to withdraw the planned honorary degree for Alberto Gonzales is motivated by our support for UDC," said T.E. Smith, Ward 8 representative on the Statehood Green Party's Steering Committee and UDC alumnus. "Statehood Greens have defended UDC when Congress and Mayor Anthony Williams threatened to dismantle it in the past decade. We believe that the Bush Administration, including Mr. Gonzales, opposes everything that UDC stands for." Statehood Greens listed several objections to an honorary UDC degree for Mr. Gonzales: -- While Mr. Gonzales served as legal counsel for Texas Gov. George W. Bush from 1995 to 1997, Gov. Bush routinely denied last-minute pleas for clemency on death sentences, rejecting requests for review of evidence. According to an Atlantic Monthly article ("The Texas Clemency Memos" by Alan Berlow, July/Augus 2003 <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200307/berlow>), Mr. Gonzales, in summaries of 57 cases he wrote for Gov. Bush, "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." The Atlantic Monthly article lists several executions that were based on questionable evidence, suppressed evidence of innocence, compromised due process, and incompetent legal representation. -- As reported by the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Texas Defender Service, and other organizations, the state of Texas has disproportionately executed African Americans, Latinos, and juvenile offenders during the past two decades, including the years of Gov. Bush's term of office and Mr. Gonzales' tenure as legal counsel. Statehood Greens note that UDC is a historical black college and the only public university in the majority-black District of Columbia, and that Congress and the White House wield the power to impose unwanted policies and laws -- including capital punishment -- on the District. -- Mr. Gonzales has justified legal loopholes allowing abuse of prisoners by U.S. personnel, and claimed that prohibitions in treaties signed by the U.S. on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment does not apply in the treatment of noncitizens abroad. In a notorious memo to President Bush on January 25, 2002, White House counsel Gonzales opined that "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war, which renders obsolete [the Geneva Convention's] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." -- Mr. Gonzales argued before the Supreme Court, in the cases of Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, that the President should have the power to imprison American citizens indefinitely, incommunicado, and without recourse to lawyers or the court. "When Alberto Gonzales took this position, he subverted the the U.S. Constitution and placed the President above the law," said Jenefer Ellingston, D.C. Statehood Green Party activist. Statehood Greens are considering participation in possible protests outside the MCI Arena on May 14, when Alberto Gonzales is slated to receive the honorary degree. MORE INFORMATION The D.C. Statehood Green Party National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Texas Defender Service "Bush's 'Blind' Justice in Texas
Executions" by "Don't confirm Gonzales for AG, say
Greens"
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