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Biden Fails a Death Penalty Abolitionist’s Most Important Test

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The mystery of Joe Biden’s views about capital punishment has finally been solved. His decision to grant clemency to 37 of the 40 people on federal death row shows the depth of his opposition to the death penalty. And his decision to leave three of America’s most notorious killers to be executed by a future administration shows the limits of his abolitionist commitment. The three men excluded from Biden’s mass clemency—Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers—would no doubt pose a severe test of anyone’s resolve to end the death penalty. Biden failed that test.
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Texas executes Michael James Perry

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HUNTSVILLE — Convicted killer Michael James Perry (left) has been executed for gunning down a nurse at her home north of Houston and stealing her red convertible nine years ago.

Perry, 28, mouthed to relatives and friends watching through a window that he loved them.

"I want to start off to everyone involved in this atrocity, they're all forgiven by me," he said in a brief statement from the death chamber gurney.

He lifted his head from the pillow and, his voice cracking, cried out: "Mom, I love you."

"I'm coming home, Dad. I'm coming home," he added. His father died last month.

He never acknowledged relatives of the nurse, Sandra Stotler, who looked through an adjacent window.

As the drugs took effect, a single tear ran down his right cheek, prompting quiet sobs from his mother and an aunt and friends.

He was pronounced dead at 6:17 p.m., the 14th prisoner executed this year in Texas, the nation's most active death penalty state.

His lethal injection came about 90 minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-day appeal. Perry's lawyers argued they had new evidence showing Perry was already in jail when Sandra Stotler, 50, was murdered in 2001 at her home near Conroe. They also contended a friend of Perry's killed Stotler.

Source: AP, July 1, 2010
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