onthebottom said:
What was Washington convicted of?
OTB
So far I have only managed to find out that he killed a woman:
"..The life of Terry Washington was doomed even before he was born. It was fetal alcohol syndrome that probably caused his brain damage, the experts said. He grew up in extreme poverty, one of 11 children living in a two-room shack with no running water or electricity. The children were beaten often, their mother was hospitalized in a mental institution and their father abandoned them for the bars. Mr. Washington's mental retardation was recognized when he entered school, and tests throughout his short life (he died at 33, after 10 years in prison) showed an I.Q. ranging from 58 to 69. His reading never advanced beyond the second-grade level. His communication skills were at the level of a 7- year-old and his social skills at that of a 5-year-old.
The brain damage was separate from the mental retardation and affected Mr. Washington's speech and his ability to understand and order concepts. His ability to put events in sequence was impaired, so that he was unable to recall the happenings in a given day in the order in which they took place. Imagine such a person sitting in a courtroom attempting to follow his own trial.
Speaking to Mr. Washington, the lawyer who represented him in his trial for the 1987 murder of Beatrice Huling may have at first concluded that his client was a shy, quiet man. A common trait of the mentally retarded is the effort to hide their disability. Any real conversation would have made Mr. Washington's problems apparent. The lawyer also had school records showing the special education courses and I.Q. results. Still, at no point during the short trial did the lawyer bring the subject of Mr. Washington's mental retardation or brain damage to the attention of the judge or jury. At the sentencing phase, the sole witness presented by the defense was Mr. Washington's mother, who told the jurors that her son was a nice boy.
During the years in which we pursued his appeals, I spent time with Terry Washington at the Huntsville prison and received many letters written in his childlike scrawl. I learned later that he dictated these letters to a fellow prisoner, then copied them into his own handwriting. He dotted his i's with little hearts. During my last visit, he proudly announced that he could spell my whole name. He made me boxes with Popsicle sticks. He told me that when they let him go he wanted to come to visit in New York City so he could see the tall buildings.
It seems obvious that if the jurors who decided his fate had known the Terry Washington that I knew, they would have understood that killing this man served no valid purpose. The theory of retribution demands that punishment relate to personal blameworthiness; adults who function at age 7 are no more blameworthy than actual 7-year-olds. Nor is deterrence served by this sort of execution, since a mentally retarded man would hardly pause before a murder to contemplate legal consequences.
Currently, half the states allow execution of the mentally retarded. But, as polls have confirmed, even to many people who support capital punishment this kind of execution feels wrong. That visceral aversion should tell us something about justice..."
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=17&did=436
"...Execution of the mentally retarded was already under a shadow at that point - a shadow has only deepened over the ensuing years. In 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, a majority of the Supreme Court held - too late for Washington - that executing the mentally retarded is "cruel and unusual" punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
And plainly, Washington's counsel had been ineffective: his strongest argument was never pressed. (Similarly, with respect to death row inmate Carl Johnson, "Gonzales failed to mention that Johnson's trial lawyer had literally slept through major portions of the jury selection.")
For these reasons, Gonzales' silence about Terry Washington's retardation is both inexplicable and stunning.
But according to Berlow, Gonzales went even further: "I have found no evidence that Gonzales ever sent Bush a clemency petition - or any document," Berlow writes, "that summarized in a concise and coherent fashion a condemned defendant's best argument against execution in a case involving serious questions of innocence...." This suggest that even the crucial issue of guilt versus innocence was frequently ignored...
http://www.yuricareport.com/Law%20&%20Legal/Alberto%20Gonzales'%20Execution%20Memos.html