I’ve never doubted that Rick Perry isn’t particularly interested in looking for opportunities to grant clemency to death row inmates. But there’s a big question that needs to be answered by this story and isn’t.
Texas has executed 200 convicts under Perry’s watch, but he has spared just one condemned man’s life in a case in which he was not compelled to do so by the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, the inmate Perry saved in 2007 was not a killer but the admitted driver of a getaway car, condemned alongside the triggerman in a joint trial under Texas’ tough “law of parties.”
Clemency — the use of executive power to reduce, forgive or delay a sentence — is considered the last fail-safe in the death penalty review process nationwide.
Yet in Texas, it is almost never granted. In fact, at least 50 of the past 200 executions were carried out without any clemency board review at all, a Chronicle analysis of state execution and parole board statistics shows. Other death row inmates’ final pleas for mercy were rejected for arriving after the board’s deadline.
That’s bad, very bad. It’s below the meager minimum standards I’d expect for this – what, is it too much trouble for the board to review a document before rubberstamping another lethal injection? It’s more evidence that our entire system is out of whack and needs a real top-to-bottom review if it wants to claim that it really is justice.
But what isn’t clear is how Perry compares to other Texas governors in this regard. We know by now that the clemency process was slipshod and careless under George Bush. That information might have been useful in this story. I seem to recall reading that Ann Richards never commuted a death sentence, though that doesn’t say anything about how she made her decisions. I know nothing about how things were under Bill Clements or Mark White. Maybe some of this information isn’t easily accessible now, but whatever we do know would have been nice to have had in the story, if only so we could tell how much of this problem is Rick Perry, and how much of it is the process itself. I suspect it’s more the former than the latter, but I’d prefer not to have to guess.