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David
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Bush
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The Man Who Wasn't There
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June
14, 2003
Pryor Unrestraint
Killer
Bill Pryor's Mad Quest for the Federal Bench
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
When Bill Pryor was running for re-election as
Attorney General for the state of Alabama in 2002, he demanded
that the execution dates of 8 prisoners be moved up so that they
could be put to death prior to the fall vote.
"Bill Pryor's a pretty harsh guy,"
says Barbara Howard, a defense attorney from Montgomery who handles
death penalty cases. "I suspect he did this as a political
ploy."
This "pretty harsh guy" is
the man George W. Bush now wants to install in a lifetime position
on the 11th Circuit federal court of appeals, covering Alabama,
Florida and Georgia.
Pryor is so maniacally devoted to the
death penalty that he objected loudly to the recent Supreme Court
decision in the Atkins case ruling that executing mentally retarded
and brain damaged people violated the Constitution.
The would-be federal appellate judge
finds nothing wrong with having court-appointed, low paid, inexperienced
and often incompetent lawyers defend death penalty cases, even
when they snooze off during testimony or fail to cross-examine
key witnesses against their clients.
Pryor also tartly dismisses allegations
of racial bias in the administration of the death penalty as
a diversionary tactic by out of state (read northern and Jewish)
defense lawyers. At gatherings of the Federalist Society, he
gripes endlessly about the appeals process available to the condemned
and has vowed to do everything in his power to truncate appeals
and accelerate executions.
From his perch in Montgomery, Pryor ridiculed
the Supreme Court's decision in Ring v. Arizona, which ruled
that only juries can impose the death penalty. He contends that
juries are too susceptible to emotional appeals for leniency
from crafty defense lawyers, thus he backs Alabama's arcane and
vicious law allowing judge's to impose the death penalty even
when a jury has recommended life in prison. President Bush claims
that Pryor is squarely in the tradition of his two favorite Supremes,
Scalia and Thomas. But even Scalia, God's willing executioner,
voted to defend the right of juries in the Ring case.
Pryor, a pious father of two, even thinks
that children should be sentenced to death and he has done so
in record fashion: Alabama has now sentenced more juveniles to
death on a per capita basis than any other states.
In short, Bill Pryor is doing his bloody
best to impress George Bush, the man who as governor of Texas
set the high bar for state executions, with his prosecutorial
zeal. By all measures, he has succeeded on both counts.
Under Pryor's gruesome reign, Alabama
has been sending more people to death row than any other state,
surpassing even kill-happy Texas. And the people who go to death
row are predominately poor black men.
Roughly 90 percent of the people on death
row were represented by court-appointed public defenders, working
on a tight budget controlled by the state. Trying cases against
such underfunded and overworked lawyers creates an enormous courtroom
advantage for Pryor and his prosecutors as the press forward
in their mission to set death house records.
The application of the death penalty
in Alabama is racist at its core. In Alabama, blacks account
for 12 percent of the population. Yet, more than 70 percent of
the inmates on Alabama's death row are black. George Wallace's
view of racial relations seems downright humanitarian next to
Pryor's coarse version.
Still when push comes to shove, Pryor
is willing to kill just about anyone to prove a point. On May
10, 2002, he gloated over the electrocution of Lynda Lyons, the
first woman executed in Alabama in the last 45 years.
In Alabama, you can also be put to death
for a crime that a jury of your peers decided wasn't deserving
of the ultimate sanction. That's because Alabama allows judges
to overturn jury verdicts at the request of prosecutors. And
they regularly do so. More than a quarter of the inmates on Alabama's
death row are there because judges threw out jury sentences of
imprisonment and imposed the death penalty.
Although he purports to be a devoutly
Catholic man, who is also in tune "with the vision of Pat
Robertson", Pryor seems to have forgotten the Sixth Commandment
handed down to Moses by the Supreme Deity of the Christian faith.
It's a curious lapse of memory given that Pryor fought tirelessly
on behalf his mentor, Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama
Supreme Court. For years, Moore crusaded to open his court sessions
with a prayer and read out stern Biblical passages along with
his unfailingly sentences. Moore also grabbed national headlines
with his campaign to have the 10 Commandments enshrined on a
stone monument inside the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme court
building, prompting a lawsuit that landed in federal court.
At a "Save the Commandments"
rally on the steps of the Alabama Supreme Court, Pryor railed
against the ACLU like a crazed prophet from the Old Testament:
"God has chosen, through his son Jesus Christ, this time
and this place for all Christians to save our country and our
courts."
To argue the state's losing case in favor
of Moore's religious monument, Pryor hired Herb Titus, the founding
dean of Pat Robertson's law school. This was not the first time
Pryor had recruited lawyers from Robertson's operation. A year
earlier he tapped Jay Sekulow to serve as his assistant attorney
general. Sekulow, who was assigned to handle school prayer cases,
previously had headed Robertson's legal outfit, the American
Center for Law and Justice.
"Pryor's political career has literally
been a crusade to 'Christianize' America through government action,"
says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United. "He
wants to overturn a half-century of court rulings upholding religious
liberty and other fundamental constitutional protections."
While Pryor argues that child convicts
should be put to death with dispatch, he fervently draws the
line at fetuses. "I will never forget January 22, 1973,
the day seven members of our highest court ripped the Constitution
up and ripped out the life of millions of unborn children,"
Pryor said in 1997. Indeed, he opposes abortion in almost every
instance, including rape and incest. Pryor even backed a ludicrous
bill in the Alabama legislature that would have appointed a lawyer
to act as a guardian ad litem for the fetus of any woman considering
an abortion.
His views haven't mellowed over time.
"Abortion is murder and Roe v. Wade is an abominable decision,"
Pryor said last year. "I support the right to life of every
unborn child."
Once those fetuses reach term, though,
Pryor washes his hands of them, especially if they are poor or
black. As attorney general he tried to undermine a consent decree
aimed at improving Alabama's notorious state child welfare system,
which stored troubled kids in abusive foster homes and wretched
psychiatric wards. When asked about his maneuvers to shirk the
requirements of the consent decree, Pryor cloaked it in the addled
rhetoric of states rights. "It matters not to me whether
the actions would leave children unprotected," Pryor said.
"My job is to make sure that the state of Alabama isn't
run by federal courts. My job isn't to come here and help children."
This man who detests federalism with
a fervor not seen since the secessionists of old now wants to
serve on a federal appeals court.
One might wonder why a man who professes
such profound hostility toward the law would choose to become
a lawyer, never mind a federal judge. Rarely at a loss for words,
Pryor is quick with an answer. "I became a lawyer because
I wanted to fight the ACLU-the Anti-American Civil Liberties
Union." Pryor says he chose Tulane University Law School
because it didn't have any "wild-eyed leftist student organizations."
Pryor's certainly no leftist, but he
sure is wild-eyed, especially when it comes to sexual relations.
He holds the ignominious honor of being the only attorney general
to file a brief attacking the Violence Against Women Act. Ever
the defender of prudish virtue, Pryor threw himself into a defense
of Alabama's Dildo Law, which forbade the sale of vibrators.
Dredging deep into the recesses of Federalist Society legal theory,
Pryor argued that there is no right to privacy in Alabama and
that the state had the authority to outlaw any kind of pleasure
devices it wanted, even when accompanied by a doctor's prescription.
Naturally, Pryor is unwilling to apply the same legal mumbo jumbo
to assault weapons.
His homophobic sentiments rival those
of Senator Rick Santorum, the famously anti-gay Republican from
Pennsylvania. In an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court
in the Texas same-sex sodomy case, Pryor urged the court to uphold
the ban. "A constitutional right that protects 'the choice
of one's partner' and 'whether and how to connect sexually' must
logically extend to activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia,
bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and
pedophilia." Santorum and Pryor must have attended the same
Christian Coalition prayer breakfast.
Pryor's legal resume bulges with other
entries to impress the neo-cons and corporate courtiers inside
the Bush White House. Take Pryor's position on tort claims, which
he quaintly calls "lawsuit abuse". Of course, he follows
the usual Republican talking points on limiting punitive damages,
capping fees for trial lawyers and the like. But he goes much,
much further than even many of the most extreme ideologues in
his party. Pryor has filed briefs calling for the elimination
of almost every federal law that impinges on corporate enterprise,
from the Americans With Disabilities Act to the Clean Water Act.
He believes that the Environmental Protection Agency should be
eliminated and its functions devolved to the states. As the Anniston
Star points out, "in Alabama there is no environmental protection
agency to speak of."
These favors on behalf of big business
are returned in kind. In 1999, Pryor founded the Republican Attorneys
General Association, a shadowy PAC-like organization that solicits
large contributions from corporations facing federal or state
lawsuits and funnels the money into state attorney general races.
Millions have come and gone in the past four years, but there's
no way to determine which companies gave money or precisely how
much, since the funds go into the RNC's "soft money"
accounts. Pryor refuses to disclose the donors and shrugs off
talk about conflict of interest.
But a March 30, 2000 story in the Washington
Post revealed that RAGA collected more than $500,000 in a single
day for a conference in Austin which featured a special briefing
for the contributors by Karl Rove, Bush's top political strategist.
Among the donors were Aetna, Microsoft, Ameritech and tobacco
companies. At the time, all of these companies faced potential
legal action by the states.
"I think this erodes every attorney
general," said former Massachusetts attorney general Scott
Harshbarger. "If you don't prosecute a case against someone
when people think you should, or defend someone when people think
you shouldn't, that's your job. But once somebody thinks one
of us is doing that for political reasons, it affects us all.
This is absolutely an effort by people with special interests
to stop attorneys general from pursuing their traditional role
as protectors of the public interest, not special interests."
Pryor doesn't like defense attorneys
much, except when it comes to defending corporations. Take his
position on the tobacco settlement, which he tried to sabotage
even though the deal meant billions of dollars to his state,
one the poorest in the nation.
"Bill Pryor was probably the biggest
defender of tobacco companies of anyone I know. He did a better
job of defending the tobacco companies than their own defense
attorneys." That's not the assessment of "a greedy
trial lawyer", but the Attorney General of Mississippi,
Mike Moore.
Eventually, the settlement was approved.
But Alabamans lost out thanks to Pryor's meddling for big tobacco.
For example, Mississippi's share of the settlement amounted $1,500
per citizen, while Alabama garnered only $900 per citizen.
Gone are the days when senators had to
divine the political views of inscrutable judges, who endeavored
to conceal their more controversial opinions on abortion or the
death penalty until they were confirmed and invested on the bench.
With Bill Pryor there's no need to read between the lines. This
is after all the man who zestfully defended Alabama Governor
Fob James' demented plan to chaining prisoners to hitching posts
as form of punishment. The fiendish plan was soon struck down
by a federal court.
"Please God, no more Souters,"
Pryor wailed a few years ago to a gathering of Republican ultras.
The prosecutor was referring, of course, to that great bugaboo
of the far right: David Souter, the enigmatic judge from New
Hampshire appointed by Bush the First, who quickly emerged as
the Supreme Court's most reasoned and restrained justice and
the only effective foil to the Scalia-Thomas-Rehnquist block.
Pryor wants everyone to know he's no
David Souter. Indeed, Pryor, like many of his fellow Bush nominees,
boasts proudly about his most rancid views on civil rights, abortion,
and tort reform. Pryor's agenda is as toxic as it is transparent:
jail the poor and execute as many as you can as quickly as possible;
allow the public sphere to be infested with Christian dogma;
roll back civil rights and voting rights gains; and protect interest
of corporate elites regardless of their crimes.
You can hail Pryor for being honest if
you like, but his brazen resume seems to speak more to the corrosive
tenor of our times, where barbarous opinions now serve as a calling
card for a lifetime position on the federal courts.
Today's Features
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/13
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