Is Rick Perry Responsible for Texas’ Wild Increase in Executions?


Related subjects: Denver Lessing, Executive Powers, In the Loop, 
Judicial Rulings, Legislation, Rights & Freedoms, Security & 
Surveillance, U.S. Law, U.S. Politics, U.S. news

14 September 2009 :: Denver Lessing

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.

http://www.casavaria.com/cafesentido/2009/09/14/4303/is-rick-perry-
responsible-for-texas-wild-increase-in-executions/