Weird. Talking heads are making much of the fact that W, who commuted a sentence for Scooter Libby, also commuted only one out of the 153 death penalties that came before him for review in Texas (see generally link). One unfortunate fact about the death penalty is that dead men tell no tales. We may wish Saddam Hussein Godspeed to hell, but his execution means that he’ll never be able to tell us about Donald Rumsfeld’s role in gassing the Kurds (link). Perhaps of greater urgency, we have forever deprived ourselves of learning what kind of help, if any, Timothy McVeigh enjoyed from Middle Eastern terrorists (link).
And here we have W enduring the obloquy of the chattering classes for commuting Libby's sentence. Yet W had to commute Libby's, lest an imprisoned Libby decided it was worth his while to tell what he knows.
Ironic that W could have saved himself all this trouble had the prosecutor just gone for the death penalty.
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