If you don’t know the jest of the charges against Texas Governor Rick Perry, you’ll want to look them up before reading.
Let me get this straight right off the bat, I believe Rosemary Lehmberg should have resigned her position. I believe any public official convicted of a criminal offense should not retain their office. If you refuse to respect the laws of the people, you have proven yourself incapable of ably serving them. However I also believe that the Governor of a state is not above its Constitution.
I cannot speak to Perry’s guilt my knowledge of the case is quite limited and I know very little about the Texas State Constitution. I can tell you in my humble opinion, he’s a huge hypocrite.
Two other Texas district attorneys were convicted of drunk driving during the Perry administration, he did nothing to coerce their resignations. Former State Representative Jim Stick was arrested in 2011 for drunk driving, this spring he was appointed by the Perry administration as legal consul for Texas Health and Human Services Commission this spring. All of these non-lawabiding citizens were Republicans. Perry wasn’t taking a moral stand, he was seizing upon a partisan opportunity.
You see in the world of Rick Perry, a Republican official drunk driving is a forgivable mistake, but a Democrat drunk driving should be removed from office.
Let’s remember George W. Bush, Perry’s predecessor in the Governor’s Mansion got there with his own DUI conviction (Dick Cheney had two). Perry is a hypocrite. He’s unethical. He may well be guilty of a felony. However as this spotlight’s been placed upon him I feel the need to point out he’s done much worse things that were completely legal.
Remember back in 2012, when the crowd applauded the amount of people executed by the state of Texas since Perry became governor. It’s now well over 250. A recent study showed that approximately 4% of American death row inmates are innocent
So, that audience was probably really applauding the completely unnecessary deaths of hundreds of murderers and ten innocent people. Rick Perry had the authority as governor to stop every one of them.
I oppose the death penalty, because of its fundamental stupidity. It is well-recorded that it costs significantly more than life in prison. No study has ever showed it to deter people from actually committing murder. Those it kills are already taken off the streets and no longer a threat to society.
The death penalty does not reduce the worst of crimes.
The death penalty does put people to death for crimes they did not commit.
Our criminal justice system isn’t perfect and beyond a reasonable doubt isn’t absolute certainty. Innocent people do get sentenced to death. While you debate the frequency of that tragic occurrence, you cannot claim it does not occur. Whether it be one in twenty-five, one in a thousand, or one in million, no risk to the life of innocent person is worth the zero societal benefit of the death penalty. In Perry’s case, the execution of an individual whose guilt is very much in doubt is quite far from a hypothetical.
While governor in 2004, Perry received a report from a forensic scientist who specialized in arson stating that the case against Cameron Willingham, a man convicted in 1992 of killing his daughters by setting fire to his home, was based on “junk science”. Perry refused to stay Willingham’s execution. He in fact endorsed the execution, declaring Willingham to have been a “monster”. Since that time, one of the prosecution’s most prominent witnesses, a jailhouse informant named Johnny Webb, has admitted that his testimony was fabricated in order to skate on an unrelated charge.
Perry has interfered with the Texas’s Forensic Science Commission’s attempts to investigate the case, going so far as to replace the chairwoman and two commission members three days before they were scheduled to formally discuss the case. Perry’s new chairman’s first act in the capacity was to cancel the meeting.
The facts are this. Perry endorsed the execution of an American citizen whose guilt he knew was in doubt. A man convicted on evidence he knew experts considered insufficient. Then he used his power as Governor in a manner, which seemingly did influence the investigation into that case. To the best of my knowledge, nothing he did was illegal, but it certainly was unethical.
Of course, Perry would have also been within the law to commute or at least delay Willingham’s sentence. Rick Perry has only commuted the sentences of 31 death row inmates. All but three of these inmates were juveniles when they committed their crimes. He pretty much had to commute those sentences after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to send a seventeen year old to the chair. That’s right, Texas was sentencing minors to death less than a decade ago. Perry also vetoed a bill in 2009 banning the execution of the mentally disabled. It needs to be mentioned that
I am an Iowan. Perry has visited us quite frequently and if (when?) this storm abates, he’ll visit us again. Our Governor here is a political opportunist, who just in his current term has given our state’s mental healthcare system to an out of state company, appointed his unqualified son to a state board and gave ex-legislators no show jobs. His lieutenant governor, who was also the secretary of the last Republican National Convention, has two old drunk driving convictions on her record. I guess I can take comfort in the fact that I know for sure they’ve never sanctioned the death of an innocent Iowan. We haven’t had the death penalty here since 1965.
Note: This is not an academic article, this is an opinion piece. None of this is new reporting. Here is a more in-depth look at the Willingham Case and Perry’s involvement.
The Hawkeye Tribunal 