Governor Rick Perry’s Thoughtlessness Is Well Illustrated by His Unthinking Defense of Texas’ Death Penalty Executions

© 2011 Peter Free

 

16 September 2011

 

 

Imposition of the death penalty may or may not be a moral wrong, but (at the very least) its imposition should be free from racial, economic, and cultural biases — in the United States, it’s not

 

Given the levels of incontrovertible proof to the contrary, any state governor who asserts that the death penalty operates with uncompromising fairness and accuracy in his state is:

 

(a) a reality-defying fool,

 

(b) callously thoughtless,

 

and/or

 

(c) someone who puts too much stock in the status quo to be capable of operating as a genuinely moral being.

 

My suspicion is that Texas Governor Rick Perry, who recently made an un-nuanced defense of executing 234 people during his governorship, is all three.

 

 

Why I’m so harsh with the Governor on this subject

 

Texas kills people right and left.  As a former cop and lawyer, I’m familiar with just how much racial and economic prejudice goes into death penalty decisions at multiple levels.  There is death penalty discrimination at police, prosecutorial, trial, and appellate levels.

 

My issue is not with society’s arguable right to execute killers.  Nor with our culture’s ostensible need for what Governor Perry called “ultimate” justice as a way of placating the “eye for an eye” blood lust within most of us.

 

My quarrel is with Perry’s obvious thoughtlessness in regard to seeing and accounting for the obvious inequities in dispensing the death penalty (in his state, as well as every other state that executes people).

 

 

Regarding the morally indefensible inequities that characterize state-ordered executions

 

U.S. experience has long indicated that imposition of the death penalty, in addition to killing innocents, exhibits pronounced racial, cultural, and socioeconomic biases in its operation.

 

You can read about this subject here (American Bar Association), here (American Civil Liberties Union), and here (Cornell Law Review).

 

You can read an insider’s view of Texas’ death policies here (on the United Kingdom’s The Guardian website).

 

 

 

There is a potentially valid utilitarian argument for executing some wrongly convicted people (the equivalent of wartime’s “collateral damage’) — but there are not moral or utilitarian justifications for the death penalty’s de facto discriminatory impacts

 

Death penalty proponents can certainly make a utilitarian argument that accepts that a low frequency of innocents will be wrongly executed.  This “collateral damage” is arguably a necessary corollary to satisfying society’s “eye for an eye” propensities.  Perfection in any social endeavor, these advocates can argue, is not attainable.

 

But, at the same time, death penalty proponents cannot make an ethically valid utilitarian argument for arresting and executing racial minorities and poor people in disproportionate numbers.

 

 

 

This subject is where Governor Perry best demonstrated his callously exercised thoughtlessness

 

It is morally inexcusable for a state governor to act (and speak) as if collateral damage and discriminatory enforcement/implementation do not accompany exercise of the death penalty.

 

For Governor Perry to legitimately defend his unapologetic execution of 234 Texas inmates, he would have to articulate ethically valid reasons why discriminatory death-dealing — according to race and income — is a valid proposition.

 

Naturally, he can’t do that.  No morally acute person could.

 

And that’s why Governor Perry strikes me as a dangerously ignorant fool or callous demagogue.  Perhaps both.