would it affect your vote in the presidential election one way or another? I hope that he was innocent, so Bush will be dogged with it for the rest of his career.
Bush invented our criminal justice system? Bush was the prosecuting and defense attorny? Bush was judge, jury, and executioner?
Bush’s responsibility in this matter is minimal. The man was found guilty of murder in a court of law. What reason would Bush have had to think that the court was wrong? Because Gary “proclaimed his innocence up until his death”? Because he converted to Islam in jail and changed his name?
Here’s another question to go along with the OP… if Gary Graham was guilty of murder, would it affect your vote in the presidential election one way or another?
If the news casters were correct for once, by Texas law, in this case, Bush had NO power to intervene.
Besides, if we’re debating the whole innocent put to death thing, let’s call the ratio 1000:1 guilty to innocent put to death. Let me say right now I will gladly be put to death, completely innocent, to ensure the extermination of 1000 murderers, rapists, and child molesters who would otherwise be released into an unwitting populace. Hell. I’d do it to get rid of even 10 of the worthless bastards.
–Tim
Bush is culpable in three ways that I can think of:
- He appointed all of the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles that made the decision on Graham. He’s solely responsible for their character as a rubber stamp for approval of executions.
People talk about the extensive appeals process, and allege that it protects against the sort of mistake that may or may not have happened last night. Appeals courts, for the most part, can only question whether judges ruled correctly, given what was before them. The Board of Pardons and Paroles was pretty much the only body with the opportunity to consider evidence that the judge and jury should have seen, but didn’t. You can be the judge of how seriously they considered that evidence, and to what extent they essentially said, ‘It’s too late for us to be questioning the judgment of the trial court.’ Because if they don’t take a new look at the evidence, and the jury verdict, then there truly was no meaningful appeal for Graham, no true chance to correct the trial record.
-
Bush could have postponed Graham’s execution for thirty days. He claims he didn’t have that power, because Gov. Richards had already used that authority once in Graham’s case. But if he’d issued the order, who was going to refuse him?
-
Bush has stood foursquare behind the sufficiency of the Texas criminal justice system with respect to protecting innocent people from being executed.
He has vetoed legislation (he’s not completely powerless as guv) that would have provided protection against one avenue by which Texas capital defendants wind up being represented by inadequate lawyers such as the one who represented Graham. He has used his influence to derail other reforms. He has used his bully pulpit, not to question a system with gaping flaws, but to tell Texas, and now the entire country, that it’s as flawless a system as humanly possible.
In this way, he has morally bound himself to this system. He may not have built it from the ground up, but he’s its cheerleader, and has done everything in his power to ensure its continuation as is, and to block any attempts at repair.
Two generations ago, we put Albert Speer in Spandau prison for twenty years, for playing a much more passive role than that in the Nazi forced-labor system.
Sure, Bush is culpable here. No contest.
And if the worst the GOP can throw at Gore is the Buddhist temple and ‘no controlling legal authority’, then it’s no contest, IMO, as to which offense is more serious. There’s a big difference between flouting our campaign finance laws (a game played to the max by both sides), and treating the death penalty like a triviality.
Will it change the way I vote? Nope. There was no way in Hell I’d be voting for Bush to begin with.
Spoofe said:
Baloney, as already explained by RTF, above.
Gosh, what reason? Maybe all of the evidence that has come out since then? Or have you not paid any attention whatsoever to the numerous articles in various papers and magazines that have discussed these in great detail?
A caller on C-Span this morning mentioned that the BPP didn’t even meet yesterday; they just faxed or emailed their votes in.
Here, with a man’s life in the balance, they don’t even get together to consider the evidence, and then discuss and deliberate. As Dylan sang 25 years ago:
“Don’t it make you feel shame
to live in a land
where justice is a game?”
And the BPP appointees get paid $80,000 a year for their ‘work.’ For that salary, the Killer Shrub could have at least hired people who were willing to get together in one place to make a difficult call like this.
$80K annually to send in a thumbs-down by email every once in awhile. Nice work if you can get it - and stomach it.
SPOOFE wrote:
Perhaps, perhaps not, but that has little to do with the spin doctors and campaign PR; if that man died and he was innocent, Bush will suffer the consequences at the polls.
Homer wrote:
I’d bet the statistics are much lower than that. What was the recent finding - 70% of all death row cases had “serious judicial flaws” in the litigation process? Was it Illinois that recently suspended capital punishment when it found something like 33 of their death row inmates found innocent and/or had their sentences repealed upon appeal and/or re-trial? (I’ll quote sources for that when I can find them.) So your “1000:1” ratio is skewed at best.
And that scares the bejeezus out of me, my friend. Although an innocent man rotting in jail for the rest of his life is bad enough, the death penalty has a finality that no one can take back. Putting any innocent man to death is, in my book, a reason to commute all death sentences to life imprisonment on the spot. It serves the same purpose without ever making such a horrible, inconsolable mistake.
Esprix
Ah, so you hope that an innocent man so that someone you dislike would be affected by it. Great going.
Marc
Nice try, no cigar. If the media could be bothered to report all the facts of a story, (like I read one place, working to find the site), he’d already recieved a 30-day reprieve from Gov Ann Richards in 1993. Under Law, he could only recieve one, therefor Bush couldn’t have done it.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/graham000623.html
Hot dang, for once I found it on abcnews.com 
Come on, his case has been reviews by around 30+ judges! you don’t seriously suppose ALL of them are out to insure death takes place no matter what?
Course, I’m still waiting to see who’ll be the lesser evil Gore and his “I can even raise campaign contributions from Buddists!” or Bush and “Microsoft is just misunderstood.”
Now, back something I didn’t mention in my previous post. Bush can’t issue another 30-day pass. It’s against the law over there. Who’d call him on it? Everyone who defends the DP and the constution, probably.
Could he have just flat out commuted his sentance? Sure. Did Gary G deserve it? Not from what I’ve read. He’s quoted as saying “Next time, I won’t leave any witnesses.”(CNN, I think, in a hurry right now) and has been generally as unrepentant as one can get. I’d think that if he really did want to live, he would have changed his attitude a little and at least looked like someone who deserved a chance to live.
RTF says:
I think this is overbroad. It does not surprise me that Bush would appoint conservative, generally pro-death penalty people when he has discretion to do so; heck, he’s conservate and pro-death penalty. He obviously wasn’t going to appoint a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals. And we have to remember that this is Texas, where a lot of people are very conservative and very pro-death penalty. That does not mean that Bush is personally responsible for the decisions made by an independent board, nor does it mean the board is not thinking and acting independently – ie, that it is a mere “rubber stamp.” Bush is no more “culpable” than the trial judge, the jurors, and every single appellate judge – but then, they’re not running for president, either.
This is mostly right but not entirely right. An appellate court can always address whether or not evidence that was offered and rejected ought to have been allowed in – in other words, whether the judge erred in refusing to admit it. They can’t evaluate the weight or sufficiency of that factual evidence, but they can throw out the conviction and order a retrial.
The appellate courts in this case found that the trial judge did not err in barring the testimony of the two other alleged eye-witnesses, for example, because they were found to be inherently unreliable. This case really doesn’t turn on the existence of “new” evidence, but rather a differet spin put on the evidence that always existed – the court should have done this, the court should have found that. But it is not the position of the appellate court to say the trial court should have gone left when it went right, if either left or right were reasonable options available at the time. In other words, an appeal is not a re-trial.
This, of course, contains the value judgment that certain evidence existed that the judge and jury “should have seen, but didn’t.” The 33 judges who ultimately reviewed the case disagreed that any evidence existed that “should have been seen, but wasn’t.” A finding that such evidence existed would of course have demanded a retrial. It wasn’t the function of the Board of Pardons to provide that retrial when the appeallate courts declined to grant it.
Attempting to leave aside the high emotions of this particular case, I will only point out that, in general, refraining from questioning the judgment of the trial court is a perfectly legitimate thing for a board of pardons to do. That’s the function of the appellate court, not the board. And, again, it is not their function to essentially re-try the defendent, especially after an appellate court has found that the defendent is not legally entitled to an actual retrial.
Again, this is a value judgment. You are determining that the appeals procedures Graham went through were not “meaningful appeals” because you disagree with them. The fact is that he had multiple appeals, over, what?, twenty years? and his conviction was always upheld, as was the judgment against him.
Yeah, this was weak. The Texas Constitution provides that THE governor may issue ONE postponement. Bush interpreted this as one postponement per inmate, when he could as easily have interpreted as one postponement per governor, leaving him with the authority to grant one because the other one was granted by Ann Richards. The provision is very vague and can be read either way – which is why Bush backed away from relying on it this morning.
I don’t see how this makes him “responsible” to some degree he otherwise would not be. Again, you are assuming Graham was innocent of the murder, and it is by no means clear to me that he was. Without that assumption – which I’m not willing to grant you – you can’t cite this as an example where a system under which innocent people are not executed has “failed.”
Please notice that I’m not saying the right thing was done in this case; just that I’m not persuaded the wrong thing was done. I don’t know enough about the case to make that determination.
This is an interesting subject for me, as I have recently had some changes in opinion on this subject in general.
I always have and always will believe that a person who murders someone in cold blood deserves to die. It is not inherently immoral for the government to take a life, I don’t give a rat’s ass about general deterrence - specific deterrence is just fine, thanks, and I believe that we can execute someone without being cruel and unusual.
Since hearing the appalling information coming out thanks to the Innocence Project, I have decided that we cannot be certain enough of someone’s guilt to put him to death.
I admire the consistency of your position. However, it is not necessary that these crumbs be “released into an unwitting populace.” I support life sentences without possibility of parole, and I would rather that 1,000 guilty murdering pigs lived out their miserable lives behind bars to avoid the unjust extermination of one innocent person.
My favorite quote on the execution was by a DJ in Dallas that Graham made his gurney, now he has to lie in it.
I am glad this man was put to death even if he didnt commit that one murder. This was no upstanding citzen. He was on a freakin crime spree when they arrested him for murder, and lets not forget that he even bragged about killing another person.
BTW, there was nothing Bush could’ve done, and I’m glad.
So, if I understand correctly, you are opposed to the death penalty and you would rather see an innocent man executed if it damages a politician you do not like rather than a guilty man if it doesn’t?
Man, that says it all about you and your morals and ethics and priorities. I have nothing else to add.
David B…
Yes, I have paid attention. Are you referring to the plethora of eyewitnesses that claim that Graham wasn’t the killer? If YOU had paid attention, you’d know that they all were unable to stick to their stories. Based on the knowledge that their stories changed (like Graham’s alibi witnesses… he claimed to have been alone with his girlfriend, who’s face he couldn’t remember, nor her address or phone number… and then he had four other people claim that he was with them, as well), I don’t think that their testimony qualifies as “evidence”. Seeing as how Bush had no reason to believe that this man wasn’t guilty, why should he have any responsibility in his death?
Esprix…
I agree, Bush WILL suffer the consequences, even if there is no evidence (as there is now) to show that Graham was innocent. Anti-Bush people wouldn’t care about the facts, they’d only care if something will bring Bush down in the polls. Unfortunately, Bush will be made into the whipping boy in this case… as shown above, there was nothing he could do, nor was there any reasonable doubt as to Graham’s guilt.
It’s a sad day when we begin wrongfully blaming leaders for supposed “mistakes” that A) aren’t mistakes and B) wouldn’t have been their mistake.
Capacitor, Sailor nailed you pretty good. Do you have a rebuttal or clarification of your original statement?
Mipsman: I don’t believe Sailor nailed Capacitor at all. Cap, correct me if I’m wrong, but what I believe he said (and what I agree with) is that since it’s already done with, and the guy has been executed as I understand, he hopes that it comes out that the guy was in fact innocent of the crime for which he was sentenced to death, thus instantly killing Bush’s claim of the infallibility of the Texas death penalty system.
I am against the death penalty because the system for capital justice in this country is so broken it’s pathetic. Low-paid public defenders regularly sleep through the trials and sentencing deliberations of their appointed clients who can’t afford a private lawyer, and sometimes even show up in court drunk. But even this is nothing compared with the fact that in only two states, New York being one of them, can someone on death row or in prison get a DNA test in an attempt to clear themself! Sure, you can ask in other states, but in only two are they actually required to do it for you, rather than blowing it off. In Texas, requests for DNA profiling are regularly denied without comment.
Moreover, I believe so-called “eyewitness testimony” should be disallowed in court, because of the appalling incidence rate of it being wrong. Women even misidentify their rapists, the most up-close-and-personal sort of assault there is, as in one case where the woman specifically concentrated on the attacker’s face to try to memorize it, and her testimony sent a guy to jail for 12 years, but DNA later proved him completely innocent. But that’s a case for another argument, perhaps.
Don’t know if it will cost him the election, but his unwavering “faith that all persons executed during my administration were guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted” is going to cost him votes. The “access to the courts” argument is scary in a system where the poor and indigent don’t have access to competent representation. Once you’ve been wrongly convicted it’s a lot harder to prove your innocence, especially in a case where there’s no clear-cut exculpatory evidence.
It’s clear that if Bush had been governor when Randall Dale Adams was going through the system, there would definitely have been one innocent person executed in TX.
A little thought experiment: you are charged with murder (doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this model, whether or not you are guilty); how many people feel would accept a court-appointed lawyer (a paid public defender, like in CA, or some randomly chosen bozo who happens to be hanging out in the room, like in TX), rather than OJ’s defense team? If you think it doesn’t make a difference, you’re deluded.