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.
