Is Rick Perry Responsible for Texas’ Wild Increase in Executions?
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Related subjects: Denver Lessing, Executive Powers, In the Loop, Judicial Rulings, Legislation, Rights & Freedoms, Security & Surveillance, U.S. Law, U.S. news, U.S. Politics Comments (1)
Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) presided over 200 executions between taking office in 2001 and June of this year. During that time, Texas executed three times more people than the next three states combined had executed since 1976. New investigations are now raising the question of just how many innocent people were sent to their deaths by a governor and a system that ignore legal obligations to examine new evidence or counter prosecutorial or judicial misconduct?
Perry has been one of the most radical proponents of capital punishment in American politics, refusing to issue a posthumous pardon to Tim Cole, an innocent man, proven to be so, who died in prison and ignoring exculpatory evidence in what appears to be a standard procedure that mystically discounts the possibility of wrongful conviction in capital cases.
Gov. Perry may either be a moral coward, afraid to offend a radical hard-right base that believes society will unravel without an aggressive death penalty system, or he may be more eager to put people to death than he is to achieve justice.
As detailed in a lengthy New Yorker feature for the Sept. 7, 2009, issue, “Trial by Fire”, Perry ignored a raft of damning scientific evidence showing an arson case against a man on death row was unsubstantiated “junk science”.
On 17 February 2004 —after Gov. Perry refused to stay his execution and falsely claimed to have judged the “facts of the case” to show guilt—, Todd Willingham was executed for a crime scientific examination appears to show he did not commit.
For the first 18 years the Texas death penalty system was in place, Texas executed 238 people, or about 13 per year. Since Perry took office, the figure has risen dramatically, to 22 per year. That particular statistic raises questions about what has changed under Rick Perry’s governorship. For one, more cases are coming to the fatal moment of execution that are affected by Republican control of the State Court of Criminal Appeals.
Since 1995, when elected Republican judges won a majority of seats on the Court, the rate of execution has skyrocketed. And those judges openly pledged during their campaigns for elected judgeship to favor the prosecution and be “tough on crime”, a strange claim for a judicial candidate whose job is to be tough on adherence to facts and to the law, not tough on the accused in particular, who are supposed to be presumed innocent.
With at least one judge accused of professional misconduct for making summary judgment on a death penalty appeal and a review panel that is reported to essentially not carry out its investigative responsibilities, operating on the assumption that the system does not fail and never actually meeting to discuss a case, Texas is not only facing the likelihood it will be proven to have executed an innocent man; it is the state considered most likely to have failed its legal responsibilities in that way.
That under Gov. Perry, the rate of executions has so dramatically accelerated has raised the ire of human rights groups that say the state’s actions are putting the US on short lists of major violators of habeas corpus and fundamental judicial rights that include Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and China. Some death penalty advocates say that only with aggressive application of the stiffest penalty allowed by law can violent crime be curbed, but there is mounting consensus among legal experts that Texas’ system is riddled with serious due process flaws that significantly increase the likelihood of carrying out executions of innocent people.
Opponents of the Texas system say instead of deterring crime, the open bias of politicians and judges toward the prosecution and toward the application of the death penalty means the state is collaborating in the escape of those who really did commit crimes that innocent people have been convicted of. With a growing problem of human trafficking and drug running, and the attendant violence, Texas may need to halt all executions until the system is fixed and at last there is a means for determining when prosecutorial mistakes or misconduct have let the guilty off by targeting the wrong suspect.
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Sign a petition to Governor Rick Perry and the State of Texas to acknowledge that the fire in the Cameron Todd Willingham case was not arson, therefore no crime was committed and on February 17, 2004, Texas executed an innocent man.