Today's San Antonio Express-News carries the column, "With Perry, it's nice to be dead sure," by O. Ricardo Pimentel.
Here's an extended excerpt:
“Nice to be sure.”
— Hondo Lane to Angie Lowe in the 1953 movie “Hondo.”
Of course, throughout the movie, what Lowe was sure of — no problems with the Apache — turned out to be patently false.
This comes to mind after comments — about the death penalty during last week's GOP debate — from the governor who fancies himself politics' answer to John Wayne. Here, however, Rick Perry was channeling Lowe, played by Geraldine Page.
“No, sir. I've never struggled with that at all,” was Perry's answer when moderator Brian Williams asked if the possibility that Texas has executed an innocent man among the record 234 under his watch caused him any sleepless nights.
Nice to be sure.
The problem: Lowe's cinematic certainty was based on what had been demonstrably true from observation. But Perry's certainty rests on proofs demonstrably untrue. In fact, his actions on the death penalty are very much like a Western shoot-'em-up, except with more gratuitous bloodshed.
There is simply no basis for such certainty. According to the Innocence Project, there have been 43 exonerations of Texas inmates because of DNA since 1989, more than any other state.
Of these 43, one was a death-row exoneration, though this person stayed in prison, convicted of other crimes. Other circumstances produced the release from death row of Ernest Ray Willis in 2004. And funny thing about that, the discredited arson science used to convict him was roughly the same as that used to convict — and, ultimately, execute — Cameron Todd Willingham that same year.
A 2003 study about Texas and the death penalty — titled “A State of Denial” — painted a picture of a state judicial system rife with problems.
There have been reforms, though not enough. They include, in this last legislative session, increasing inmate access to DNA evidence testing and steps toward uniform state witness identification procedures. But there are people in prison, including on death row, whose convictions predate such reforms. Their appeals for help deserve a governor who doesn't view his role as repriever of close-to-last resort as a rubber stamp for the courts.
"Celebrating death: Executions dirty U.S. rights record," is the title of Michael Stafford's column in the Opelousas Daily World in Louisiana.
Multiple studies have found evidence of discrimination based on the race of the victim, the race of the defendant, or even both, in capital sentencing. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, despite that fact that African Americans account for half of all homicide victims, since 1976, more than 75 percent of those sentenced to death in the United States were convicted of killing a Caucasian. Those receiving capital sentences are also typically poor and indigent — about 90 percent of the criminal defendants sentenced to death in the past thirty-five years could not afford to hire their own lawyers. And they are disproportionately Southern — from 1976 to 2010, the states of the former Confederacy accounted for more than 70 percent of all executions. If we include the Civil War "border states" and Oklahoma, it's more like 90 percent.
Today, the person most likely to be executed in America is a poor minority, represented by a public defender, convicted of killing a Caucasian in the South. It is impossible to separate this reality from its historic context.
Even worse, as George Will noted in 2000, the actual administration of capital sentencing in our judicial system "is a catalog of appalling miscarriages of justice, some of them nearly lethal. Their cumulative weight compels the conclusion that many innocent people are in prison, and innocent people have been executed."
As one would expect, many religious leaders and denominations have spoken out officially against capital punishment. Pope John Paul II, for example, repeatedly called for clemency and the abolition of the death penalty throughout his pontificate. And the Catholic Church is hardly alone in its opposition to capital punishment. A 2003 report by the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission concluded that, "[i]n the final analysis, biblical teaching does not support capital punishment as it is practiced in contemporary society ... The practice of capital punishment in our nation and [Texas] is an affront to biblical justice, both in terms of its impact on the marginalized in society and in terms of simple fairness."
Austin NPR Affiliate KUT-FM posts, "Perry’s Death Penalty Record Likely Won’t Move Voters." It's produced by Matt Largey. Audio is available at the link.
On Thursday, the state of Texas is scheduled to execute its eleventh death row inmate this year.
Duane Buck was convicted of killing Debra Gardner and Kenneth Butler in 1995. Buck’s lawyers have asked for a new sentencing hearing, citing racially-biased testimony in his original sentencing.
The state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected Buck’s request for a stay of execution earlier this week. Prosecutors have also declined to intervene.
The governor’s office is one of the only options left for delaying his execution.
Governor Rick Perry’s record on the death penalty has gotten some attention in the past few weeks, as he seeks the GOP presidential nomination.
And:
His stance on capital punishment is in line with the mainstream of voter opinion.
Polls in Texas routinely show strong support for the death penalty. Even national polls find a majority of voters back it. But for all that Texas law-and-order talk, it should be noted that generally, “Texas’ governor has very limited power with respect to capital punishment,” said Steve Hall, who was a staffer for the Texas attorney general in the 1980s. He now runs the group StandDown Texas, which advocates for a review of the state’s death penalty system.
Hall says while in other states governors sign execution warrants and set execution dates, “that’s not the case in Texas. The governor, at least in theory, has a very limited role of being able to hand out a single 30-day reprieve in scheduled executions,” Hall said.
That is a power Perry has only used twice in his 10-plus years in office.
Hall points out that decisions to seek the death penalty are made by local prosecutors and appeals are decided by elected judges.
The governor does appoint members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which makes recommendations on whether to commute death sentences and issue reprieves.
Austin Chronicle journalist Jordan Smith takes a lengthy examination of the record in, "Perry the Executioner." It's a must-read.
In fact, commutations are exceedingly rare in Texas – virtually nonexistent. In Rick Perry's 11-year tenure, Foster's was the sole commutation based on a recommendation of the BPP – i.e., made without some court action (such as the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 ruling that banned the execution of juvenile offenders). By the same token, independent commutation recommendations from the board have also been few and far between: Since 2001, the BPP has made three recommendations that a death sentence be commuted to life. In two of those cases, Perry rejected the recommendation and allowed the offender to be executed. In fact, Perry stands in the annals of history as the governor who has presided over the most executions during the modern era of the death penalty. Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated, Texas has executed 474 inmates; Perry has presided over 235 of those, far outpacing the second most killing governor, George W. Bush. "Texas still by far leads ... in executions with four times as many as any other state [in the U.S.]," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center. As executions nationally have declined over the last decade, Texas' death machine has not slowed, even as the number of new death sentences imposed by Texas juries (and sought by Texas prosecutors) has decreased. "The decline is a national phenomenon," says Dieter, "but Texas still leads the way" in executions.
As concerns about the death penalty have increased nationally – with 16 states now banning capital punishment and several more (Maryland, Montana, Colorado) likely to do so soon, says Dieter – Perry has not hinted that he has any concerns either about flaws within the machinery of justice or that tinkering with life and death might be a risky business. (He reiterated that conviction last week in a GOP presidential primary debate when the mention of his record of executions elicited cheers from the partisan crowd.) In fact, he's said the opposite. When Anthony Graves was freed last year after 18 years behind bars – including 12 on death row – for a crime that essentially no one, including Perry, now believes he committed, the governor said Graves' exoneration was an example of how well the Texas system works. "I think we have a justice system that is working, and [Graves is] a good example of .... You continue to find errors that were made and clear them up," Perry told reporters. "That's the good news for us, is that we are a place that continues to allow that to occur." With a backdrop of questions and concerns about capital punishment rising across the country, Perry's emergence as a tough-on-crime candidate for president raises its own serious question for voters: What does Perry's record in dealing with death say about the governor's approach to and feelings about capital punishment?
Earlier commentary of the record of Rick Perry and Texas' death penalty begins at the link.
Comments