Even Innocence Can't Stop Texas Death Machine

Rick Perry

By Clavell Jackson

If you are thinking that Texas governor Rick Perry might make a good president, consider this quote made by a primary voter during his race with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. A voter said of Perry, "It takes balls to execute an innocent man."

As of Sept. 5, Perry has executed 235 people, or one every 17 days, and the next execution is imminent. This figure should be shocking for several reasons. The death penalty, as practiced in America, is a highly flawed process. The Innocence Project has received widespread publicity for the fact that it has freed hundreds of inmates from death row. Before the advent of DNA, death row convictions largely relied on eye-witness evidence and questionable testimonies. In many cases these testimonies where given under duress or even extracted by good-old fashioned torture.

Some of the techniques used by the Chicago Police Department, for example, include beating suspects with phone books (they don't leave bruises), whippings with rubber hoses and chaining suspects to radiators. The Illinois criminal justice system was so flawed that a few years ago former Gov. John Ryan released all of the inmates from death row. And a Chicago Police captain, who lead a squad that extracted several false confessions using torture techniques, was recently jailed for his crimes.

At this time, I don't have evidence that Texas law enforcement officials have extracted confessions using torture, but there is ample proof that the Texas criminal justice system is highly flawed. Craig Watkins, the first black district attorney of Dallas County, went through past death penalty cases and found most of them were suspect. According to a 2007 NPR report, Dallas had gone through 36 cases and found 12 of the men innocent. The Dallas DA's office has exonerated more than 20 people so far.

So from this information, you can summarize that a good number of the 235 people that Perry has killed were likely innocent. Apart from the inaccuracy of the death sentence process, one also has to look at the racial aspect of it. According to the Innocence Project, there have been 273 post-conviction exonerations and 70 percent of those exonorees where minorities.

This leads to the troubling case of Duane Edward Buck, an African American who killed two people and wounded another person in a 1995 domestic shooting. During his trial Dr. Walter Quijano testified that Buck was more prone to violence because he was African American. According to Fort Worth Star-Telegram writer Bobby Ray Sanders, "The prosecutor asked if Butler's African-American race increased the likelihood of his being a further danger. The psychologist said it did. As it turned out, Quijano made a reputation of testifying that a person's race or ethnicity, namely black and Hispanic, made it more likely that they would continue to be a threat to society -- something (John) Cornyn as attorney general noted was, in fact, an egregious error." According to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Quijano has also given testimony in 100 capital cases.

There are several major problems with Quijano's testimony:

• Most scientists agree that race is an artificial construct of society. What does Quijano defines as race, skin color or ethnicity? Is an African native raised in an upper-class London neighborhood as likely to commit violence as an African American kid raised in an impoverished single parent home in South Central? One could argue that they both come from the same race, but their backgrounds are very different.
• While about 60 percent of the inmates of the American justice system are black or Latino, it could be argued that this has more to do with racist sentencing practices than cultural behavior. Studies have shown that convicts faced harsher sentencing for possession of crack, which was used by black drug users, than drug users who used cocaine, which was seen as a drug used by wealthy white people. So it could be argued that the reason why there are more blacks and Latinos in jail is not because they are more prone to violence, but because the racist justice system is more likely to throw them in jail for crimes. In addition, there is a much greater chance of a crime being investigated if the victim is white. Crimes against minorities are often not a high priority for police. The vast majority of capital crimes involve white victims, while a much higher percentage of victims of capital crimes are in fact minorities
• Quijano's suggestion that blacks and Latinos are more violent than other races ignores several historical facts. For example, World War II, the most violent war in the history of mankind, extinguished about 72 million lives, and it was conducted largely by Europeans (whites).
• The introduction of Western (white) colonists to Africa, the Americas and Australia has been a disaster for native people. White people spread across the United States because of the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the native people. The Native American population pre Columbus was estimated to be up to 18 million, now it is down to about 4 million. In Australia, the indigenous population, before the advent of white people was between 750,000 to 1 million, now the figure is down to about 400,000.
• Many black nationalists such as Malcolm X have accused white people of being the most efficient practioners of genocide. Joseph Stalin was believed to have killed about 20 million people, and Adolph Hitler was responsible for about 10 million deaths. Europe has been awash in bloodshed for centuries. The longest period of peace was post-World War II to the Yugoslavian war in the 1990s.
• Criminal profilers have said the majority of serial killers are white males. The most notorious killers, people like John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson, were all white. It is only in recent years, where we have heard of black serial killers like the DC Sniper and the Grim Sleeper. In addition, the majority of work place and school shootings are committed by white males. So one could make an argument that white males are more prone to serial killings and work place shootings than people of color.

You can find incidence of violence and mass murder among all races. Ghengis Khan and Mao Tse Tung, both Asian, were efficient killers and in Rwanda an ethnic war generated more than 1 million corpses in less than a year. But it's particularly shocking that a so-called expert would use the questionably concept of race to justify the execution of black and Latino prisoners.

Unfortunately, this callous disregard for human life is not surprising in Texas, a state that seems to revel in its frontier attitude towards justice. This is exemplified in the troubling case of Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texan who was given the death penalty for arson.

A Texas arson investigator later concluded that there was no evidence of arson and sent his findings to the Gov. Rick Perry and the Board of Pardon and Paroles to no avail. It seems that once the Texas Death Machine has been set in process, not even innocence is enough to stop it.

Tea Party Monster is Choking its Republican Creator

It's a sign of how awful the mainstream media is when some of the best reporting is found in Rolling Stone. Yes, Rolling Stone, a magazine that is known for covering drug-addled rock stars, broke the story that took down former Afghan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. And Rolling Stone Matt Taibi has also done some of the most hard-hitting and insightful writing about the mortgage crash and Wall Street's shenanigans.

Taibi also did one of his trade mark acerbic pieces about the Tea Party. Taibi says, "A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it."

The article features an illustration where a Frankenstein-like monster, representing the Tea Party, is being stitched together by Sen. Mitch McConnell. It's interesting because the Tea Party, which was a creation of the Republican party, is beginning to look like it's eventually going to choke its creator.

The fiscally conservative Tea Party was supposed to have sprung up in opposition to President Barack Obama's health care reform legislation. But where were these people when President George W. Bush was waging two unfunded wars, giving tax cuts to billionaires and pushing the Medicare prescription drug benefit? According to figures from the Congressional Budget Office, Dubya increased the deficit by $5 trillion, while Obama has only increased the deficit by $1.4 trillion so far. (In spite of their reputation for fiscal conservatism, Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush increased the deficit, while President Bill Clinton left a budget surplus.)

In reality, the Tea Party is a triumph of branding. It was the same GOP repackaged in a new shiny box, kind of like the new coke. The Tea Party, a supposedly grass roots movement, is actually funded by Americans for Prosperity, a group that is headed by former Republican Congressman Dick Armey. It's sponsored by the Koch brothers, some of the wealthiest political backers in the country. The brilliance of the Tea Party is that it managed to get middle-class Americans to get out and march in the sun for policies that benefit billionaires!

But then something unexpected happened, the Tea Party began to get out of control. The Tea Party's popularity let clueless politicians like Christine O'Donnell, who has never won a race in her life, and Sharon Angle, who became famous for running away from the media, and mistaking Latinos for Asians, get a national spotlight. O'Donnell and Angle were so wacky, that voters ended up electing Democrats, even though the mood of the nation was supposed to be turning against them.

But it didn't stop there. The Tea Party movement also swept up politicians like Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who bragged about secession while balancing the budget with Obama stimulus money, and the idiotic Rep. Michele Bachmann, who claims she is for small government, even though she has received millions of dollars in federal money, and used to work for the IRS!

Now we have a lot of angry, white people who are pushing for the Tea Party's fascist mantra. The Tea Party is steering the Republican party even further to the right. So what happens when you push a party that is already pro corporation and anti-regulation even farther? You get fascism. As Benito Mussolini said, fascism occurs when the state and corporate interests merge.

Mainstream Republicans are worried. Former White House adviser Karl Rove actually said Tea Party presidential candidates were coming across as too far right. In an interview with Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Dallas Tea Party leader Phillip Dennis called Karl Rove, "a big-spending, big-government moderate!" Now when Karl Rove, the man who was nicknamed "Bush's brain," is called a moderate, the crazy train has left the station.

The thing is politicians like Speaker John Boehner and Karl Rove, are old-time insiders. They know how the system works, and they realize that Republicans can't get elected if they let a bunch of lunatics, who say they want to let the U.S. default on its debt, who don't believe in global warming and who want to turn Medicare into a voucher system, get elected, the Republicans are screwed. Senior citizens vote en masse, and they won't take kindly to politicians who want to eliminate the programs that keep them alive.

And it seems the American public is finally waking up to the fact that by voting in Tea Party politicians, they essentially handed the lunatics the keys to the asylum. Tea Party governors Rick Scott, John Kasich and Scott Walker are already facing revolts at home as voters realize they are trying to cut essential services and go after teachers, cops and firefighters. According to a recent New York Times article, the Tea Party is less popular than Muslims and atheists.

But the genie seems to be out of the bottle. The Tea Party has unleashed a wave of wild-eyed ideologues who are going to drive the Republican party right off the cliff. And right now the Democrats are pulling up a deck chair and grabbing some pop corn.

Ron Paul Says American People Are Demanding Third Option

Rep. Ron Paul talks to CNN about former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's decision to speak at the Tea Party convention. (She is alleged to be collecting $100,000 for his speech.) Palin turned down the opportunity to speak at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convention alongside other Republican 2012 hopefuls, which may suggest that she is positioning herself to run as a third-party candidate.

I don't think Palin is a serious candidate and even if she ran on the third party ticket, she would only guarantee their failure. Palin creates drama every where she goes, and unlike Ronald Reagan, who was called the Teflon President because scandals never stuck to him, Palin is theVelcro Candidate who collects scandals the way nerds collect Star Wars figures. If the Teabbagers want to put their faith in a candidate as shallow as Palin, they have big problems.

Paul, a Republican with a libertarian streak, says that the main problem with the American political system is that both parties are too similar, especially when it comes to their views about the size of government and fiscal policies. He has some points, although I would argue that there is a big difference between a Republican party that started two wars and gave tax cuts to the rich, and a Democratic party, which is trying to push through health reform and middle class tax cuts.

Paul says that any third-party candidate will have a hard time breaking through the American political system. He said that even getting on the debates is difficult if you do not belong to either of the two parties.

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