One Angry Man (About Abbott wanting to pardon convicted murderer)

[Nevilledog]

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/greg-abbott-pardon-daniel-perry/


After seventeen hours of deliberation spanning Thursday and much of Friday, a jury of Daniel Perry’s peers unanimously convicted him of murder in the 2020 killing of Garrett Foster at a Black Lives Matter protest. Over the weekend, roughly eighteen hours after a segment on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox show complaining about the verdict, Governor Greg Abbott promised to overturn the ruling by pardoning Perry as soon as possible.

The details of the crime are almost immaterial to Abbott, who’s motivated purely by political considerations. The Texas governor has been rooting around for issues to make his congenitally dull brand more appealing to national conservatives, and this is a good one. Foster was attending a protest against police violence in Austin when he was shot, the sort of protest right-wingers in Texas have long opposed. Perry, an Army sergeant who was working as a rideshare driver that night, was the right kind of person for Abbott to back.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition,” according to a modern aphorism. “To wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Foster, an Air Force veteran, was legally carrying a rifle in accordance with state law as he protested police violence. He is the man whom the law binds but does not protect. Perry was an Uber driver who drove into the protest, saw Foster approach with his rifle, and shot him five times with a gun he was also legally allowed to carry, claiming the right to self-defense. Perry is the man who the law protects but does not bind.

The case concerning the shooting of Foster was not a he said, he said. In his statement to police following the shooting, which was videotaped and shown to the jury in full, Perry didn’t claim that Foster pointed his gun at him—which itself would not be sufficient cause to claim self-defense, under the instructions provided to the jury, but would have helped his case. No witnesses claimed Foster had been aiming at Perry, either. (Perry later claimed Foster had raised the barrel of his gun, though that too is disputed by witnesses.) Instead Perry, who says he’d been distracted before he turned into the path of the protest, said that he “didn’t want to give [Foster] a chance to aim at me.” So Perry shot him five times with a .357 revolver through the window of his car.

*snip*

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

There is no grand principle of justice that the governor is expressing. There is only this: the law must bind my enemies and not my friends, and it must protect my friends but not my enemies. That approach may be an inevitable result of one-party rule, but it also, historically, ends pretty badly for everyone. It is hard not to feel foreboding about what Tucker Carlson might tell the governor to do next.