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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a full pardon for U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry.
Perry was convicted last year of murder in the shooting death of Garrett Foster, a USAF veteran and BLM protestor. Foster had attended a downtown Austin protest armed with an AK-pattern rifle, and joined his fellow protestors in illegally barricading the street. Perry's car was halted by the barricade, Foster approached the driver's side door, rifle in hand, and Perry shot him four times from a range of roughly 18 inches, fatally wounding him. Police reported that Foster's rifle was recovered with an empty chamber and the safety on.
Perry claimed that the shooting was self defense, that the protestors swarmed his vehicle, and that Foster advanced on him and pointed his rifle at him, presenting an immediate lethal threat. Foster's fellow protestors claimed that Foster did not point his rifle at Perry, and that the shooting was unprovoked. They pointed to posts made by Perry on social media, expressing hostility toward BLM protestors and discussing armed self-defense against them, and claimed that Perry intentionally crashed into the crowd of protestors to provoke an incident. For his part, Foster was interviewed just prior to the shooting, and likewise expressed hostility toward those opposed to the BLM cause and at least some desire to "use" his rifle.
This incident was one of a number of claimed self-defense shootings that occurred during the BLM riots, and we've previously discussed the clear tribal split in how that worked out for them, despite, in most cases, clear-cut video evidence for or against their claims. The case against Perry was actually better than most of the Reds, in that the video available was far less clear about what actually happened. As with the other Red cases, the state came down like a ton of bricks. An Austin jury found Perry guilty of murder, and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
Unlike the other cases, this one happened in Texas, and before the trial had completed, support for Perry was strong and growing. That support resulted in Governor Abbott referring Perry's case to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. A year later, the board returned a unanimous recommendation for a pardon to be granted. Abbott has now granted that pardon, and Perry is a free man, with his full civil rights restored to him. He has spent a little more than a year in prison, and his military career has been destroyed, but he is no longer in jail and no longer a felon.
So, now what?
It seems to me that there's a lot of fruitful avenues of discussion here. Was the shooting legitimate self-defense? To what degree did the protestors' tactics of illegally barricading streets, widespread throughout the Floyd riots and a recurring prelude to tragedy, bear responsibility for the outcome? How should we interpret Perry's comments prior to the shooting, or Foster's for that matter?
Two points seem most salient to me.
First, this case is a good demonstration of how the Culture War only rewards escalation, and degrades all pretensions to impartiality. I do not believe that anyone, on either side, is actually looking at this case in isolation and attempting to apply the rules as written as straightforwardly as possible. For both Blues and Reds, narrative trumps any set of particular facts. No significant portion of Blues are ever going to accept Reds killing Blues as legitimate, no matter what the facts are. Whatever portion of Reds might be willing to agree that Reds killing Blues in self-defense might have been illegitimate appears to be trending downward.
Second, this does not seem to be an example of the process working as intended. If the goal of our justice system is to settle such issues, it seems to have failed here. Red Tribe did not accept Perry's conviction as legitimate, and Blue Tribe has not accepted his pardon as legitimate. From a rules-based perspective, the pardon and the conviction are equally valid, but the results in terms of perceived legitimacy are indistinguishable from "who, whom". As I've pointed out many times before, rules-based systems require trust that the rules are fair to operate. That trust is evidently gone.
This is what we refer to in the business as a "bad sign".
Alright, so what would be a “good sign”?
Assuming that the evidence was genuinely unclear, I don’t see how the scissor can be avoided. Either the initial conviction was unjust, or the pardon was. This isn’t new to Current Year.
I suppose I find it a bit premature to say people aren’t accepting his pardon. On Twitter, sure. Until someone denies him a job as if he were still a murderer—or until Jack Ruby shows up to launch a conspiracy theory—I’d say law and order are holding together.
I've recently pointed out elsewhere that I'd expected the feds to go after Rittenhouse, and that didn't happen, and it's meaningful that it hasn't. I've been meaning to do a deeper breakdown on other contemporaneous predictions I'd made, and while the retrospective looks bad, it's not maximally bad. As another example, not seeing Biden pardon Reality Winner helps suggest that there's some goals other than hitting the other team as hard and as unabashedly as possible, as much as situations like the mockery of James Gardner might feel like it.
There's space for other stuff, here. We could have seen prosecutors not immediately respond with another dip to the same well. TraceWoodgrains highlighted, as a specific contrast to calls for unilateral disarmament, the importance and possibility of a Biden administration that would "seek Republicans out and install them into the less overtly ideological spots in his cabinet", instead of dodging court mandates to throw money at people with four-year degrees. We could have some level of insight when major court cases not bother to use any more than a handwave to distinguish a Gadsden Flag from Students for Justice in Palestine with a handwave, or maybe faculty showing a bit more of a standard today. We could have people here respond to my presentations of extremely short sentencing or outright non-prosecution of serious bad actors by showing something similar and/or encouraging such leniency with the political valence flipped, or at least discomfort where pardon of an aggressive sentencing turned into a spurious bribery investigation, rather than demanding increasingly impossible statistical analysis. We could have a FACE Act prosecution on religious matters drop the hammer.
We don't, often. That sort of costly signal is costly, after all, even if not necessarily that costly.
It happens. Stranger things have happened! Just not often.
On the other direction, I'm disappointed, if not surprised, that Abbot and the Parole Board provided very little explanation or justification highlighting the specific evidence they believe justified this pardon. This isn't an analysis; it's an order. I don't think progressives would care whether Abbot was motivated specifically by scattershot of thirty different tiny details from the court record, or some bad process by the judge in question, or a sudden appreciation for limits on jury research, or whatever.
But it would at least open the possibility of debating a matter on the merits or the facts. Instead, rather than risk depending on factual claims that might be wrong, there's nothing here but frame control and leaving space for others to fight over frames.
I am absolutely saving that Tong ruling to respond to crocodile tears about the "free speech" of Hamas supporters.
This country turned into a hysterical parody of East Germany in 2020.
We used to make the Czechoslovakia comparison, but at least "why won't you put up the Workers of The World Unite sign, comrade?" was only an implicit threat.
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