[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 8



TEXAS:

Rick Perry's big applause moment: Where's the respect for human life?


It was disturbing to hear people cheer last night when it was announced that 
Rick Perry had overseen a record number of executions in the modern era. I have 
to remind myself that these people are cheering justice, an abstract principle, 
not the ending of human life. On the flip side, though, can you imagine the 
same crowd's reaction if people at a liberal event cheered a record number of 
abortions? I realize it's apples to oranges, but there is a basic respect for 
human life. Even when Americans used to hang people from gallows, they did it 
with a basic level of dignity and humanity.

Rick Halperin, Director, Embrey Human Rights Program at Southern Methodist 
University, had this response: "The fact that in 2011, Americans, or any 
audience in a civilized country, would give prolonged and loud applause at the 
fact that our governor has presided over 234 executions in one state -- more 
than any other governor in the history of a state -- is a disturbing and 
disgraceful commentary on America's unwillingness and inability to move beyond 
embracing violence as a cure for social problems. Inherent flaws in this state 
under Gov. Perry's tenure are well documented, and questions need to arise 
about executing those subject to racial prejudice, innocence and mental health 
issues. It's disturbing to hear Gov. Perry say he's never struggled with any 
case when so many questions continually arise regarding implementing the death 
penalty in this state under his tenure. It is well documented that the capital 
punishment institution in Texas is inherently flawed and mistakes have indeed 
been made in wrongly convicting, incarcerating and executing the innocent."

On a related note, tomorrow night is a special SMU event at 7-9 p.m. in McCord 
Auditorium: "Ending the Cycles of Violence: Reflections on Compassion, 
Forgiveness and Healing." According to a press release:

The event will feature a diverse gathering of religious and peace leaders, 
including 9/11-hate crime survivor Rais Bhuiyan of WorldWithoutHate.org; Mavis 
Belisle of the Dallas Peace Center; Bill McElvaney, professor emeritus of SMU's 
Perkins School of Theology; SMU Chaplain Stephen Rankin; Acharya Shree Yogeesh 
of the Siddhayatan [Hindu-Jain Tirth] Spiritual Retreat Center; Brother 
ChiSing, a Thich Nhat Hahn-ordained Buddhist minister and director of the 
Dallas Meditation Center; and Hind Jirrah, co-founder of the Texas Muslim 
Women's Foundation. The moderator will be Dianne Solis of The Dallas Morning 
News. The free event is sponsored by SMU's Embrey Human Rights Program in 
Dedman College and the Dallas Peace Center.

(source: Michael Landauer/Editor, Dallas Morning News)

************

Cheering for state-imposed death


At last night's GOP debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry was asked by Brian Williams 
about the 234 executions of death row inmates over which Perry has presided -- 
"more than any Governor in modern times"-- and the mere mention by Williams of 
this morose record triggered an outburst of cheering and applause from the 
audience:

This episode is creepy and disgusting, though as both Ta-Nehisi Coates and 
Dahlia Lithwick point out, it's hardly surprising for a country which long 
considered public hangings a form of entertainment and in which support for the 
death penalty is mandated orthodoxy for national politicians in both parties. 
Still, even for those who believe in the death penalty, it should be a very 
somber and sober affair for the state, with regimented premeditation, to end 
the life of a human being no matter the crimes committed. Wildly cheering the 
execution of human beings as though one's favorite football team just scored a 
touchdown is primitive, twisted and base.

All of that would be true even if the death penalty were perfectly applied and 
only clearly guilty people were killed. But in the U.S., the exact opposite is 
true; see here to read about (and act to stop) a horrific though typical 
example of a very likely innocent person about to be executed by the State of 
Georgia. That Perry in particular likely enabled the execution of an innocent 
man -- as well as numerous other highly disturbing killings, of the young and 
mentally infirm -- makes the cheering all the more repellent. That the death 
penalty in America has long been plagued by a serious racial bias makes it 
worse still. That this death-cheering comes from a party that relentlessly 
touts itself as "pro-life" and derides the other as The Party of Death -- and 
loves to condemn Islam (in contrast to its war-loving self) as a 
death-glorifying cult -- only adds a layer of dark irony.

This happened at a GOP debate, involving the current GOP front-runner, and 
progressives are thus rushing forth to condemn it (condemnations with which I 
largely agree). The Philadelphia Daily News' Will Bunch called it "utterly 
sickening" and "a pathetic new low in American politics." Bunch added: "What 
you heard echoing in the Reagan Library last night was not reason. It was 
bloodlust, pure and simple, and it was repulsive." That's because "the cheering 
of executions is the hallmark of a sick society -- one that's incapable of 
tackling its real demons and looking for vengeance on whomever happens to be 
available."

I agree with all of that, and that's why this morning's orgy of progressive 
condemnation made me think of very similar death-celebrations that erupted at 
the news that the U.S. military had pumped bullets into Osama bin Laden's skull 
and then dumped his corpse into the ocean. Those of us back then who expressed 
serious reservations about the boisterous public chanting and celebratory 
cheering of executions were accused by Good Democrats of all manner of 
deficiencies.

Yes, the 9/11 attack was an atrocious act of slaughter; so were many of the 
violent, horrendous crimes which executed convicts unquestionably (sometimes by 
their own confession) committed. In all cases, performing giddy dances over 
state-produced corpses is odious and wrong.

Now that this issue has been vested with a partisan angle, and many Good 
Progressives are marching forward to condemn the act of ecstatically cheering 
for executions, perhaps the reservations many of us had over the joyous, 
chest-beating street celebrations over bin Laden's corpse can be better 
understood. Like drenching a citizenry with fear and keeping them in a state of 
Endless War for more than a decade, training them to publicly rejoice when the 
Government puts bullets into people's heads or injects poison into their veins 
-- even if that act is justifiable -- inevitably degrades the citizenry and the 
character of their nation.

(source: Salon)

*********************

Brian Williams Shocked and Appalled That GOP Debate Audience Supports Death 
Penalty


In next year's presidential election, the toughest opponent the eventual 
Republican nominee will face will be the liberal press. As a political neophyte 
who had not even completed a single term in the U.S. Senate prior to his 
election, Barack Obama was and is a creature of the media. Without the 
iron-clad grip that liberals hold on public discourse at the national level, 
there's simply no way that he ever would have been elected in 2008. His 
numerous subsequent failures have made it all the more necessary that liberal 
journalists come forward to obfuscate his failures and shift attention to 
attacks on Republicans. Fear and loathing is the new hope-a-dope.

There's a growing sense of this reality on the right which is why the focus in 
the primary season has increasingly turned to the self-proclaimed objective 
press, particularly during last night's debate hosted by NBC News and the 
Politico.

I blogged earlier about Newt Gingrich's attack on co-moderator John F. Harris 
but another moment of note last night was when Harris's colleague, NBC anchor 
Brian Williams, haughtily attacked the audience after it sarcastically cheered 
against his question to Texas governor Rick Perry about capital punishment.

"What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the 
execution of 234 people drew applause?" he asked. Perry responded easily to the 
question and got another round of applause, surely to the continued 
befuddlement of Williams.

As someone who makes his living by trying to appeal, at least in some fashion, 
to the emotions of crowds, Williams's inability to understand the audience's 
spontaneous outbreak of applause response to his declaration that Texas "has 
executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times" 
is a classic case of a liberal elitist being unable to compute that his smugly 
held opinions are not shared by others. It was the media analog of 1988 
Democratic presidential nominee's Michael Dukakis's anodyne response when asked 
in a debate about whether he would want a hypothetical murderer of his wife 
executed.

But perhaps I'm selling Williams's perspicacity short. One suspects he would 
likely have understood a similar audience reaction were it to applaud 
enthusiastically a Democratic candidate's firm support for abortion 
legalization. Such a response could equally be perceived as grisly but it seems 
unlikely that Williams would entertain such a thought.

Far from being the celebration of death and killing that the contemptuous 
Williams implied it was, the audience’s reaction was more of spontaneous 
protest vote against the holier-than-thou anti-execution crowd which has for 
decades tried to shove its minority viewpoint onto the vast majority of 
Americans who disagree. The fact that many of the same crowd doing this shoving 
also is fond of insisting that conservatives should refrain from “legislating 
morality” on other issues such as abortion or gay rights makes the audience 
response all the more understandable.

Despite their best attempts, death penalty opponents have been unable to 
eradicate capital punishment. This perpetual failure has enraged them as one 
can see in the vituperative responses to Perry and the audience collected by 
the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto who notes that “whatever one thinks of 
the death penalty or the audience's behavior last night, the harshness, 
self-righteousness and simple-mindedness of these responses belie the left's 
self-image as intellectually sophisticated and tolerant of other viewpoints.”

Last night, Brian Williams provided a technicolor version of that contempt.

(source: About the Author----Matthew Sheffield is the creator of NewsBusters)

******************

On the same day that a ghoulish "gladiator" forum crowd at the Reagan Library 
cheered the announcement that Texas Gov. Rick Perry had executed 234 people, a 
man appointed by Perry to chair the Texas Forensic Science Commission, Sam 
Bassett, accused the governor of covering up the state killing of a likely 
innocent man.

The executed prisoner, Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted and sentenced on 
what was likely faulty forensic evidence. Bassett was fired as chairman of the 
commission, as previously reported in BuzzFlash at Truthout, just before the 
Forensic Science Commission was about to formally issue a scathing report about 
the highly flawed "arson" investigation that led to Willingham's conviction.

Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Daily News commented about the rousing approval 
of putting people to death - innocent or not - at the GOP debate: "What you 
heard echoing in the Reagan Library last night was not reason. It was 
bloodlust, pure and simple, and it was repulsive."

"It was utterly sickening to watch," Bunch reflects. "When Perry - who recently 
vetoed a bill that would halt the execution of the mentally ill - told the 
audience that anyone convicted of murder in the Lone Star State faces 'the 
ultimate justice,' the applause grew even louder."

As for Perry, he was asked by Brian Williams, the moderator of the NBC/Politico 
sponsored September 7 debate, "Have you struggled to sleep at night with the 
idea that any one of those might have been innocent?"

Perry adamantly responded, "no, sir. I've never struggled with that at all."

Basset calls the Willingham execution and cover-up of the botched evidence 
indicative of Perry's character and decision making.

But as BuzzFlash at Truthout pointed out in its previous commentary on the 
Willingham execution, Perry and his advisers may know exactly what they were 
doing. In a focus group run by a 2010 Republican primary opponent of Perry, a 
Texan voter spoke admiringly of Perry going ahead and executing Willingham, 
saying: "It takes balls to execute an innocent man."

Given the response of the GOP faithful at the Reagan Library to Perry having 
surpassed George W. Bush's record-setting rate of executions when he was Texas 
governor, it's clear that Perry is going to get the cojones vote, because no 
"liberal wimp" is going to murder someone who is probably not guilty.

(source: Mark Karlin----Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout)

**************

Execution By Race


When the United States Supreme Court approved death penalty statutes, it did so 
on the promise that race would play no role in the decision to execute a 
person. That, of course, mirrors society's moral stance. Some people believe 
capital punishment is just. Some don't. But we can all agree that deciding who 
lives and who dies must not be determined by the color of their skin.

Despite this broad agreement, our nation has failed to rid race from the 
decision to execute — take, for instance, the case of Marcus Robinson in North 
Carolina. And now, shockingly, Texas appears poised next week to execute Duane 
Edward Buck based on the fact that he is black.

In Texas, imposing the death penalty in capital cases comes down to one 
question: is the defendant going to be a "future danger" if he or she is not 
executed? Mr. Buck was sentenced to die based on testimony by Dr. Walter 
Quijano, who told jurors that Mr. Buck was more likely to pose a future danger 
to society because he is black. Dr. Quijano's testimony came in 1997, more than 
20 years after Texas promised the Supreme Court that "no correlation exists 
between the race/ethnic background of a defendant and the probability that he 
will be either convicted of capital murder or given the death penalty."

The same psychologist gave similar testimony in a total of seven Texas cases. 
In 2000, then-Attorney General John Cornyn did something highly unusual for a 
prosecutor: he called for the retrial of all seven men who had been sentenced 
to death based on Dr. Quijano's testimony that their race or ethnic background 
made them more dangerous. This list of seven included Duane Edward Buck.

Courts granted new sentencing trials to six of those inmates, but upheld Mr. 
Buck's unconstitutional death sentence on technical procedural grounds (which 
we have previously noted often lead to unjust results based on form over 
substance). Mr. Buck was therefore not granted an opportunity to have a new 
sentencing hearing unbiased by race. He is scheduled to be executed by the 
State of Texas on September 15, 2011.

Attorney General Cornyn was a vigorous defender of the death penalty in Texas, 
but made it clear that he wanted no part of calling for executions that were 
based on this kind of racism: "The people of Texas want and deserve a system 
that affords the same fairness to everyone." It remains to be seen if the 
governor agrees.

We must not allow the execution of a man on the basis of his race. You can help 
to prevent this injustice: go here to urge Texas Governor Rick Perry and to the 
board of pardons and parole to intervene before it's too late.

(source: ACLU)