[PAA-Discuss] What Rick Perry Wasn't Asked About the Death Penalty

[Juli Kring]

What Rick Perry Wasn't Asked About the Death Penalty
-By Tim Murphy| Wed Sep. 7, 2011 8:08 PM PDT

When NBC's Brian Williams asked Texas Governor Rick Perry on Wednesday night
about his state's record on the death penalty-234 executions and
counting-the crowd at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California
broke into spontaneous applause. It was an instantly memorable moment in a
debate with few of them:

By this point, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that
conservatives, particularly those who wait in long lines to attend
Republican primary debates at the Reagan library 14 months before the
election, are big fans of the death penalty. Perry's 234 executions are a
modern-day record for a governor, breaking the one held by his
predecessor-George W. Bush. But on a night where Williams and his
co-moderator, Politico's John Harris, were for the most part on their game,
it was something of a missed opportunity to get the Texas Governor on the
record about a story he's been reluctant to talk about: The execution of a
man who was probably innocent, based on evidence that was proven to be
false.

Williams asked Perry, "Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea
that any one of those might have been innocent?" Perry was unequivocal: "No
sir, I've never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas has a very
thoughtful, a very clear process in place of which when someone commits the
most heinous of crimes against our citizens, you kill one of our children,
you kill a police officer, you're involved with another crime and you kill
one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of
Texas and that is you will be executed."

Williams followed up by asking Perry what he thought about the fact that his
recitation of the death penalty statistic was an applause line.

"I think Americans understand justice. I think Americans are clearly, in the
vast majority of cases, supportive of capital punishment. When you have
committed heinous crimes against our citizens-and it's a state-by-state
issue, but in the state of Texas, our citizens have made that decision, and
they made it clear, and they don't want you to commit those crimes against
our citizens. And if you do, you will face the ultimate justice."

Perry knows his base, and he played to them perfectly with his answer. But
there's no need for hypotheticals here. 

Perry has been repeatedly presented with evidence that should have
challenged these sweeping assertions-and he's repeatedly brushed them aside.
When, in 2004, new advances in arson science seemed to prove that death row
inmate Cameron Todd Willingham had not, in fact, murdered his three children
via arson, Perry denied a stay of execution. And when the Texas Forensic
Science Commission, after taking the unprecedented step of reexamining the
case, seemed on the verge of posthumously exonerating Willingham, Perry took
the also unprecedented step of replacing three members of the commission.
Just like that. Last year, meanwhile, when Texas Monthly helped spring an
innocent man, Anthony Graves, from death, Perry pointed to the case as proof
that the system works. Which is true-if your definition of a functioning
criminal justice system is one in which courts wrongly sentence an innocent
man to death, only for an intrepid journalist to swoop in and, after
countless hours of work, help secure his release.

Tim Murphy is a reporter at Mother Jones. Email him with tips and insights
at tmurphy at motherjones.com. 

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/what-rick-perry-wasnt-asked-about-death-
penalty



__._,_.___

Reply to sender | Reply to group | Reply via web post | Start a New Topic 
Messages in this topic (1) 
Recent Activity: 
Visit Your Group 

MARKETPLACE

Stay on top of your group activity without leaving the page you're on - Get the Yahoo! Toolbar now.
 
A bad score is 598. A bad idea is not checking yours, at freecreditscore.com. 

 
Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use



.
 

__,_._,___

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://paa-tx.org/pipermail/discuss_paa-tx.org/attachments/20110908/80523954/attachment.htm>