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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".
This feels to me like another example of how America does not really seem to have a coherent philosophy when it comes to gun posession and use of force. Like, you are allowed to have a weapon, you are allowed to use it to defend your home, you are allowed to shoot intruders... But the police are also allowed to issue no-knock warrents for a wide variety of crimes, allowed to explode into your home in the middle of the night, and if they see you with a gun/knife/bat/dog chew they are definitely allowed to put 27 rounds into you. If they get the house wrong it's NBD. But yeah bro, you're definitely allowed to use guns to defend yourself.
Similarly here. Foster was allowed to open carry a rifle. He was allowed to walk up to a car on the street. He was allowed to have a hand on his rifle. ... He's allowed to have two hands on his rifle? well maybe, but low ready is out, apparently. Though, the jury thought it was in, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He's not allowed to point it at anyone, sure. but there's point at, and point at, isn't there. is he allowed to muzzle sweep you? what if it's just your legs? Foster was clearly in a position to 'quick draw' on Perry... is that enough to justify shooting first?
I don't know. Seems like a pretty thin knife edge to balance the lives of two men on.
Is this problem even solvable? It seems to me that it probably isn't. If you give your citizens free access to devices which can kill in a split second it's understandable that the police don't particularly feel like politely knocking at the door of the crack house and giving some PCP-addled junkie the opportunity to fill them full of buckshot. Perhaps, like school shootings, this is simply a price that Americans are willing to pay to ensure they have access to firearms.
I agree with everything you've said. But there's another American tradition that comes into play. Surely you've heard of "reasonable doubt." In a case like this, there seems to be an awful lot of it. Case closed? Well, the idea that reasonable doubt ever gets the appeal that our foundations say it should is pretty laughable, but everything you've listed seems like clear cut reasonable doubt. It's not like this guy went out and sought someone to murder in something that looked like it could have been self-defense, and the risk vs reward of imprisoning someone wrongly as opposed to accidentally letting a nearly-self-defense-but-actually-murder-committer off the hook doesn't really favor a conviction.
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