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| Curmie won’t make anyone look at a photo of Greg Abbott |
There were the twin debacles concerning pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, and Curmie has another piece in the works in which Abbott’s knee-jerk petulance is foregrounded. (Watch this space!) And now he’s pardoned a convicted murderer just because he didn’t like the victim’s politics.
As Last points out, Garrett Foster was something of a right-wing pol’s wet dream (Curmie’s term, not Last’s). Young, attractive, a military veteran, a strong enough supporter of the 2nd Amendment that he took at AK-47 to a Black Lives Matter protest. Oh, and white. Mustn’t forget that part.
Trouble was, he wasn’t there to interfere with the demonstration; he was a participant. So a self-proclaimed racist and likely perv named Daniel Perry shot and killed Foster on the night of July 25, 2020.
It appears that Perry researched the various levels of murder and manslaughter charges and apparently sought to create a situation in which he could claim to have been in fear for his life so he could shoot somebody. What a noble lad!
On the night in question, Perry finished his shift as an Uber driver (remind Curmie to use Lyft if he’s in Austin), rounded the corner and came upon the protest. He could easily have driven around it, but instead, he ran a red light and rammed into the crowd, hitting a number of people, including Foster’s wheelchair-bound fiancée. Curiously (OK, not actually curiously at all), the “exhaustive review” conducted by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles (all of them appointed by Abbott, of course) didn’t bother to mention this part of the story. Or perhaps it did, and Greg Abbott just didn’t care. It matters little if that little detail was omitted by Abbott himself or by his appointed minions.
Anyway, according to literally every witness, Foster stayed calm and did what he could to alleviate the pressure. He tried to wave Perry on. Yes, he was carrying an assault rifle. Why these things are legal to open-carry in Texas is beyond Curmie’s ken, but Greg Abbott seems to think it’s a good idea… unless, of course, the guy doing so doesn’t own a MAGA hat or answer to “Jim-Bob” or “Bubba.”
Again, according to literally every witness, Foster did not raise his weapon and indeed did not have a finger on the trigger. To be fair, all of those witnesses were protesters themselves, so they might be a little biased against the guy who killed their comrade. But <insert late-night informercial voice here> that’s not all! You know who else says Foster didn’t raise his weapon? Daniel Perry. You read that correctly, Gentle Reader. The guy who’s claiming self-defense initially admitted that he wasn’t actually being threatened: “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me” (emphasis added).
By this logic, and that of some “expert” defense witness Perry’s lawyer dredged up out of the “Testimony for Sale” database, if Curmie now sees someone, anyone, walking down the street carrying a gun, I’m within my rights to shoot to kill, not just if he does anything to actually threaten me, but even if I’m a paranoid coward like Daniel Perry and just sorta kinda think he might.
Oh, and unless Curmie’s been led astray by all those cop and lawyer shows he’s watched over the last half century or more, self-defense is an affirmative defense, meaning the burden of proof shifts. The prosecution must prove that the defendant committed the act; the defendant doesn’t need to prove that he didn’t, only that the case hasn’t been proved beyond reasonable doubt. When self-defense is presented as an argument, however, the presumption is that the claim is untrue, and the defendant must prove, at the very least, that it is more likely than not that he was indeed acting in self-defense.
And guess what? The jury didn’t buy the argument. Let me put it a different way: twelve out of twelve jurors were convinced that Perry was lying. Not a single juror had even reasonable doubt of Perry’s legal and ethical guilt. It may be a little problematic that all of the witnesses were participating in a demonstration that Foster joined and Perry sought to disrupt. But it’s a hell of a lot more problematic that the only person claiming self-defense is the defendant, on trial for murder, and that he himself acknowledged, at least initially, that there was no immediate threat.
Of course, the day after the obvious verdict was announced, before Perry was even sentenced (!), Greg Abbott proclaimed that he’d grant a pardon if his hand-picked minions the Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended it. Was he acquiescing to the demands of the despicable Tucker Carlson, or did he come to this remarkably moronic conclusion on his own? We’ll probably never know.
What is clear is that it is that Abbott could not possibly have studied the evidence presented at the trial and done his actual job at the same time. Not in order to issue a reasonable statement a day after the verdict. Life is easier, of course, if you form a conclusion based on your prejudices and then grab hold of any excuse, however spurious, to ignore the actual facts. Those of us who care about actual justice have more struggles.
It is obvious that Greg Abbott is a grand-standing fraud, a hypocritical ideologue, and an authoritarian asshole. Whether he’s also a racist idiot, or just likes pandering to his base, a sizable proportion of whom are racist idiots, is unclear.
It’s also crystal clear that the pardon, which the Houston Chronicle’s Cayla Harris and Neena Satija describe as “the first time in at least decades that a Texas governor has pardoned someone for a serious violent crime, let alone murder,” was an act of raw political power, a show of force, with no concern for the reality of the events described. There is literally (and, Gentle Reader, you know that Curmie is enough of a Grammar Nazi that when he writes “literally,” he means literally) no evidence to support a claim of self-defense except Perry’s (ahem…) “amended” memory of what happened.
Oh, and by the way, there seems to be no disputing that Perry did indeed run a red light and drive into the crowd, thereby surrendering any claim to self-defense. The best the defense had to offer was the the claim that Perry inadvertently ran that red light and plowed into the protesters while texting. Oh, well if he was only reckless when he obviously broke the law, that’s all right, then, right? Even if Perry’s claim is true, which is about as likely as Curmie’s undergrad alma mater winning next year’s NCAA basketball tournament (they were dead last in a pretty weak league this year), there would be no way the demonstrators could have known that he had no ill intent, but was rather a reckless jackass who still shouldn’t be driving for Uber. It would be reasonable for them to believe that they were being threatened. Had Foster shot Perry, in other words, there might have been a legitimate self-defense argument. Not the other way around, though.
Witness, too, Abbott’s cheap shot at prosecutor, Travis County District Attorney José Garza, who had the audacity to prosecute a murderer whose politics aligned with the governor’s. It’s difficult to argue with Garza’s assertion that the pardon places “politics over justice and made a mockery of our legal system.”
Side note: if Greg Abbott wants to say nasty things about José Garza as a personal opinion, he’s absolutely entitled to do so, just as Curmie can offer a personal opinion about Greg Abbott. But to use the power of the governor’s office to say nasty things about Garza as fact in an official document is pretty close to libel, if indeed it hasn’t crossed that line.
A couple days after announcing the pardon, Abbott slithered off to the annual fellation (we can hope that it was only metaphoric) of the NRA. Of course, he’d just pardoned a murderer who had killed a man for the sole reason that the victim was openly carrying a weapon; one might imagine that the NRA wouldn’t take kindly to that, but of course they’re just as ideological and almost as hypocritical as Abbott. And one suspects that the average melanin count of attendees was rather low.
Gentle Reader, if you want to say that there is no clear evidence of a racial motive in the killing of George Floyd, you’ll get no argument here. If you want to suggest that the death of a single petty criminal in Minnesota shouldn’t incite massive protests around the country, Curmie’s willing to listen, at the very least. If you want to claim that some BLM protests became violent, and that some of that violence was initiated by the demonstrators themselves, Curmie nods in agreement.
But this particular episode at this particular protest at this particular time in this particular place needs to be looked at individually. (Curmie goes Confucian again. Who’da thunk it?) This incident is clear-cut. Daniel Perry is a racist, a liar, a coward, and… oh, yeah, a murderer. He should be in prison because he’s an obvious danger to society. Not as big a danger as Greg Abbott, though.
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