Perry Displays Varied Stance Toward Crime

Texas Governor Rick Perry (R)

AUSTIN — By the spring of 2004, when Rick Perry had been governor for over three years, the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole had yet to recommend to him that a single death row inmate be spared.

That May, though, the board’s chairwoman allowed the lawyer for Kelsey Patterson to personally present to her an 11th-hour plea that the inmate’s execution be blocked because of his severe mental illness.

Twelve years earlier, Mr. Patterson had murdered two upstanding residents of Palestine, Tex., for no apparent reason and then fled to a nearby yard where he stripped to his brown socks, gesticulating and hollering until the police arrived.

Juries had previously found Mr. Patterson, who had paranoid schizophrenia, incompetent to stand trial for other senseless assaults. After the double murder, however, he not only was tried but also testified, ranting about electronic implants in proceedings so tumultuous that he was repeatedly ejected from the courtroom or gagged with duct tape.

When the parole board voted unexpectedly to commute Mr. Patterson’s sentence to life in prison, his lawyer, euphoric, was cautioned by a legal counselor to Mr. Perry, “Honey, don’t get your hopes up.” Only the board has the power to recommend clemency, but the governor can deny it.

And indeed, the next day, Mr. Perry rejected the recommendation. Mr. Patterson was executed, and his incoherent final statement ended with the bell-clear “Give me my life back.”

In campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Perry has vigorously defended the executions on his watch: 236 over nearly 11 years.

Explaining in 2004 why he was rejecting clemency and upholding the execution of Kelsey Patterson, Mr. Perry said, “No one can guarantee this defendant would not be freed to commit other crimes were his sentence commuted.” Mr. Patterson would have become eligible for parole at 74.

Responding recently to that reasoning, Charles Aycock, a former Texas State Bar president who served on the parole board at the time, said in an interview: “Baloney. We would have never released anybody like that to the street.”

To some here, Mr. Perry’s championing of the death penalty seems crystallized by his 2001 veto of a bill banning the execution of the mentally retarded and by his refusal to stay the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 after a last-minute report from an arson expert cast doubt on his guilt in his three daughters’ deaths in a house fire.

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Source: The New York Times, October 30, 2011