Rick Perry’s Lethal Overconfidence

Huntsville Unit, Huntsville, Texas

Jaws dropped when the governor of Texas, running for president, said on national television he was “100 percent sure” everyone who had been executed on his watch was guilty. The governor was George W. Bush, appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, during his first presidential run. Six months before Bush's election, Texas executed Gary Graham, who continued to protest his innocence even as the lethal injection was killing him and whose objections were almost certainly true. Then, just before Bush moved to the White House, Texas executed Claude Jones. Last year, new DNA testing on a hair found at the crime scene cast doubt on Jones's guilt.

Asked at Wednesday night's presidential debate if he ever worried that Texas had executed an innocent person on his watch, Perry answered, “I've never struggled with that at all.”

Certainty is cheap if one achieves it by ignoring the actual facts, and indeed, Governor Perry's answer to the death-penalty question asked of him Wednesday night reflected a staggering inattentiveness to the facts. As the founder of the Texas Innocence Project, I've had a couple of dozen clients executed during Perry's tenure as Governor. There are some I think could well have been innocent-- Frances Newton, for example, who supposedly killed her husband and two children without getting even a spot of blood or speck of gunpowder in herself; or Charles Nealy, who did not remotely match the description of the person who killed the convenience store clerk . But, there was no DNA in either case, and so I am left being unsure.

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Source: The Daily Beast, David R. Dow, September 9, 2011

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