I definitely agree that Bush is in no real way responsible for the increase in capital punishment in Texas. That’s obvious.
However, I find it sickeningly bloodthirsty that Texans are so willing to execute so many poor/minority people in contrast with wealthier/whiter murderers, and I consider it to be verging on a a crime against humanity. Given this , I consider Bush’s lack of use of his bully pulpit to rail against the unequal use of the death penalty to be 100%, unequivocally, undeniably, a tacit statement of FULL support for this unequal use of the death penalty.
The other theory, yours, is that he was willing to keep quiet because it would help get him elected.
Your hypothesis would be more acceptable, assuming that he actually did things that helped the US during his time as president. I’m not saying that every decision he made was wrong, but I definitely consider his term as POTUS a net negative.
As for Orson Scott Card keeping it factual, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Yeah, he gets fooled by urban legends found in chain emails all the time, and frequently has to fact-correct himself in his columns. He is the one of the laziest fact-checkers I know (particular given his high intelligence), which correlates highly with his devout Mormonism.
Hmm. Under Ann Richards 34 people were executed. Under George W. Bush 152 were. Under Rick Perry over 234. Texas governors have no control over the number of executions? When was this enabling legislation passed?
They have no technical legal control over who can be nominated for clemency or pardon. That is 100% the legal power of the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole, once they vote for clemency or pardon the Governor then has the option to approve or deny it. The only unilateral power the Governor has is the ability to grant a one-time, 30-day reprieve.
Now, from a practical standpoint members on the Pardons and Parole board are appointed by the governor. However their terms are not synchronized with gubernatorial terms, so there isn’t even a guarantee that a governor will have board members from the same political party as him let alone of the same opinion as him on capital punishment.
It’d be a lie to say the Texas Governor has absolutely no impact on capital punishment. They could vet all of their pardon board appointees and require that they be very pro-clemency, they could also apply significant political pressure on board members just by virtue of being Governor. However the whole reason the Texas system appears to be set up the way it is (as someone mentioned) is so no one body can definitively be said to have been responsible for the execution. It may have originally been set up to avoid gubernatorial corruption but it appears now it is the way it is so that no one person really has to accept responsibility for the executions.
Because no one person has to accept responsibility, I think it makes it a lot easier to allow larger numbers of people to be executed.
So from a strict factual perspective, the Governor of Texas has no legal authority to permanently commute a sentence or stop an execution (aside from temporarily.)
Now, my personal opinion on why executions have increased so much in Texas is more a story of local culture and politics than it is anything to do with Ann Richards, George Bush, or Rick Perry. I think the Texas legislature wanted there to be more executions so they passed legislation that made executions faster to carry out. I think the Texas people like executions so they are more likely to elect prosecutors who will be “hard on crime” and campaign on being willing to seek the death penalty, and Texans are more likely to elect judges who are similarly oriented. This creates a “bottom-up” system that is pre-disposed to generating more death sentences than in other places, and then at the top of the system you have a bureaucratic board that can distribute any “responsibility” for letting the executions be carried out among its several members, and a Governor who can shrug his shoulders and say he’s powerless to act without the board’s approval.
I don’t follow your logic, you’re saying you don’t buy into my hypothesis that Bush intentionally played up his pro-capital punishment credentials in order to get votes because Bush was a bad President? Bush’s performance as President has nothing to do with his performance as a candidate or his desire to get votes. All Presidential candidates want to get votes, regardless if they end up being good or bad Presidents.
You seem to have a strange interest in the life of a science fiction writer that you don’t personally know. But in this case, he was correct and you were incorrect. You stated that the Texas Governor, “like any other Governor” could grant clemency or pardons. However the Texas Governor cannot, so Card’s claim that the Texas Governor is a weak Governor is factually correct (for reasons other than just capital punishment issues) and your claim that the Texas Governor can grant clemency just like any other governor is incorrect.
My point was that, if he was keeping quiet about the death penalty inequalities to get elected, then it would be at least understandable if he had both the intention and the ability to make the country better if he got elected.
Actually, I have met OSC several times, at local signings. He lives about 40 minutes from where I do, and used to do a LOT of book signings around here. He would give long talks about the state of The Ender’s Game movie, politics, etc., etc…
And he didn’t specifically claim that the Texas governor couldn’t grant pardons. He just said that the Texas governor had relatively little power.
As well, my original complaint to him, about Bush, wasn’t that Bush wasn’t granting pardons. My complaint was more generic. I just complained that Texas is bloodthirsty in its application of the death penalty, and that Bush presided over Texas during a time of lots of executions.
My general complaint/concern was that Bush lacked compassion/caring for poor and middle-class people. His stance on the death penalty is, I feel, good evidence of that.
Ya’ll are referring to two different laws. The 1936 law took the power over executions (and commutations) out of the governor’s hands.
A law passed in 1995 dramatically sped up the process for death row appeals, which resulted in a huge increase in executions staring around 1997 after that law passed appeals.
I don’t think anyone is saying the lack of power by the Texas Governor to unilaterally grant clemency is why Texas has a high rate of executions. Only that because of that significant limitation on the power of the Governor it is hard to actually blame the Governor. Death sentences are primarily controlled by prosecutors and judges, neither group reports to the Texas Governor.
In 1995 the Texas legislature passed a law that expedited the appeals process in capital cases, and that is probably the only thing at a State government level that explicitly can be said to contribute to the high number of executions.
The “Texas Moratorium Network PAC” which is a Texas PAC opposed to the death penalty primarily blames Texas DAs for the death penalty, specifically Texas DAs in a few specific counties. Since Gregg v. Georgia over 130 executions have been carried out from cases out of Harris County, and over 100 Texas counties have never sent a person to death row since Gregg v. Georgia.
That same advocacy group also points to Texas having popularly elected appellate judges (who are the judges who review the automatic appeals every death sentence gets), and the fact that Texas is in the 5th Circuit (more conservative) for Federal appeals are other significant factors.
The Texas governor is barely even involved in legislation activity (that being more the purview of the Lt. Governor) let alone the criminal justice system.
Divided executive is fairly common in State government, I actually don’t know if any state has all executive branch officers appointed by the governor. Most have an elected AG and Secretary of State, for example. Only 5 States have a gubernatorial appointee AG, 35 States elect State Secretary of State.
I don’t think that in general the number of statewide elected offices is why the Texas Governor is weak, the Texas Governor is primarily weak because the Texas Lieutenant Governor is extremely powerful relative to Lieutenant Governors in almost every other State. The Texas Lt. Governor has actual legislative day-to-day powers that he actually uses, and is involved in the legislation and budgeting process.
In most States the Governor behaves more like the President, coming up with a budget plan that the legislature either approves or modifies significantly and then approves. That’s really why the Texas Governor is weak generally, because unlike most Governors the Texas Governor has almost no actual legislative power and very little “practical” legislative power.
If you look at the U.S. Constitution the President would be a lot weaker if Congress basically was fully assertive of its powers, but because Congress is typically divided between parties and various intra-party factions, and because a lot of day-to-day governing is handled by executive agencies that follow Presidential orders the U.S. President is de facto a lot more powerful than he is on paper. In Texas basically none of that is the case so the Texas Governor is both technically and practically weak.
He’s not weak because he can’t grant clemency, as that’s a minor power in any case, but the fact that he can’t grant unilateral clemency is just another example of the genuine weakness of the Texas Governor.
You’re right, and I didn’t. As others have pointed out, the streamlined appeal process probably accounts for the rising numbers since 1997. That happened while Bush was Governor, and Perry is the only other Governor to serve since then.
It’s probably more instructive to look at executions per year, rather than by Governor, given that Perry, for example, as served three times longer than Richards.