When a U.S. attorney tried to get Alberto Gonzales to reconsider the Department’s decision to seek the death penalty for a defendant, he was told that Gonzales had already spent a “significant amount of time” on the issue — meaning “5 to 10 minutes.” When Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) asked Gonzales about that case, he couldn’t remember it. That USA, Arizona’s Paul Charlton, was among the nine fired U.S. attorneys, and this instance of “insubordination” was cited as justification.
So today, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) asked Michael Mukasey what his approach to the death penalty would be. And he promised to “review every such decision” to seek the death penalty “in excruciating detail.” Presumably that means more than 5-10 minutes.
But when pressed as to whether he would promise to speak to U.S. attorneys who disagreed with the Department’s decision to seek death, Mukasey refused. He’d want to have that U.S. attorneys’ views “made known” to him, he said. But he’s concerned, he said, about similar cases getting “different treatments in different jurisdictions.”
So it’s unclear if Charlton’s view that “if a government seeks to take another person’s life it should do so on only the best of evidence” would get a more sympathetic hearing from Mukasey.