Death Penalty: Slow AG down

How does one repay a public official such as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales? If you're President Bush, you give him more power, of course. We're sure Gonzales is not yet done making a mockery out of the Justice Department he's polluted with his Bushwhacked politics.

Regardless, the administration is hard at work, reports the Los Angeles Times, creating a fast-tracked death penalty system, giving Gonzales "expanded powers" over cases. So what if he's not a federal judge? So what if he has a creepy history of being almost enthusiastic about the death penalty?

In June, The Washington Post reported that Paul Charlton, one of the nine U.S. attorneys Gonzales fired, told Congress that his former boss "has been overzealous in ordering federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty, including in an Arizona murder case in which no body had been recovered" (emphasis ours) and that Gonzales was "eager to expand the use of capital punishment."

The new system, an express lane to the death chamber, if you will, gives inmates less time to appeal their sentences in federal courts (six months instead of a year), and federal judges would have less time to consider those cases.

Gonzales can try to obscure the truth with his lies and peculiar form of amnesia, but we can all see, with horrific clarity, what George "Let's-have-'Sanctity-for-Human-Life'-Day" Bush is trying to perpetrate in his last months in office. He must be stopped, and we're sure the 3,350 inmates currently on death row agree.