As alert readers of “Capitol Chronicle” may have noticed last week (the rest of you can go back to sleep), a production error deleted the bottom inch of the text, rendering the column unintelligible (or at least more so than usual). We apologize for the error, which resulted in the omission of several crucial details, to wit:
At press time Wednesday, Perry’s decision was still pending (he has until Sunday, June 17, to sign or reject the bill). The conclusion to last week’s column bears repeating in full:
“If Texas had a true clemency process, the Board of Pardons and Paroles would periodically intervene on behalf of mentally retarded or mentally ill defendants who, whatever their terrible crimes, were incapable of the moral culpability the death penalty supposedly requires. The board has never done so. Not once.
“Should Perry veto House Bill 236, he will demonstrate once again that there is no mercy in Texas. And the governor will not be able to claim that he is incapable of understanding the consequences of his actions.”
(The June 8 column remains available in full at www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2001-06-08/pols_capitol.html.)
Following the Supreme Court’s June 4 decision to reverse the death sentence in the John Penry case (because the jury instructions had failed to allow the jury to honestly consider Penry’s retardation), the lobbying over House Bill 236 intensified. Senate sponsor Rodney Ellis persuaded Florida Governor Jeb Bush to call Perry to discuss the bill (the final version was partly modeled on a Florida bill passed with Bush’s support), and Ellis himself met with Perry for the same purpose. At a Capitol press conference the next day, Ellis would say only that he had encouraged the governor to “listen to all sides” before he made his decision.
A few minutes earlier, a brace of prosecutors from around the state held their own press conference, lamenting gravely that it would be inconceivable to interfere with their solemn authority to execute the retarded. Since Texas prosecutors campaign for office by ritually impersonating the Grim Reaper, it’s not surprising that they would object to any limitation on their power to kill, even if only a half-dozen or so wretches per decade might escape the needle. It’s the principle of the thing.
Still, it was amusing to hear the assembled lawmen justify their opposition to the bill by describing it as an unprecedented attack on the authority of juries, because it allows a judge to reconsider, with the assistance of medical experts, a jury’s decision on the mental capacities of a convicted killer. David Weeks, spokesman for the district and county attorneys, explained that never in the history of Texas criminal law had judges been given the power to overrule the solemn hanging decision of 12 ordinary citizens, etc., etc.
I was nearly moved to righteous tears by that thought — then I recalled that only a few weeks earlier I had heard a group of prosecutors, including several of those assembled here, testify against a bill that would allow juries in capital cases to consider a sentence of life without parole. One by one, the prosecutors sternly explained to the legislators that such an alternative sentence would simply confuse jurors, and if any such option were to be considered, only prosecutors had the experience and objectivity to bear that awesome burden. The recollection made me a bit skeptical about the prosecutors’ newly declared devotion to the independent authority of juries.
But in any case, the prosecutors went on, it would be unconstitutional to exclude the mentally retarded from execution because that would create a “new class” of citizens not subject to the same rights and duties as their fellows. The prospect of dozens of mentally retarded murderers lining up in court to demand their right to be executed did give me pause — until I remembered that more than a dozen states already have laws banning the execution of the mentally retarded and of minors, and the Constitution is little worse for the wear.
And there are still plenty of candidates for the state to exterminate.
Sen. Ellis made some of the same arguments a few moments later, adding pointedly that those who insist (like Governor Perry and President Bush) that Texas is not now executing the mentally retarded should have no objection to banning the practice. Ellis also acknowledged that he was feeling a little lonely as the de facto post-legislative point man on the death penalty, defending the only bill left of the two dozen or so capital punishment reforms optimistically proposed in January. Where were his fellows, many of whom voted for the bill? “It’s not easy going against prosecutors in Texas,” Ellis said.
All in all, the prosecutors should not despair. It was a good week for the death penalty. The end of the legislative session is likely to accelerate the rate of Texas executions — we’ve fallen behind Oklahoma, for god’s sake — and the state’s preeminent devotion to the gurney is now being emulated nationally. On Monday, Timothy McVeigh died as (re)scheduled, and new U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared that just because 17 of the 19 federal prisoners awaiting execution are members of minority groups is no reason to suspect that federal death penalty prosecutions are racially biased.
If that isn’t entertaining enough for you, there was the final melodramatic touch of McVeigh’s taste in poetry, the Victorian breast-beating of William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”: “I am the captain of my soul,/I am the master of my fate.” It was a dubious sentiment from a man who learned his history from The Turner Diaries and his indifference to “collateral damage” (to civilians) from the U.S. military. But then McVeigh’s juvenile machismo was immediately echoed by the statement drafted for the executioner-in-chief: “One young man met the fate he chose for himself,” said George W. Bush.
Such elegiac language should be reserved for heroes. Our way is to grant it, by execution, to mass murderers.
We All Could Use a Drink
Let’s all raise a toast to Jenna and Barbara Bush, whose misfortune was to be born to a family entirely devoted to social promotion. If Daddy were not so determined to rise above his natural station, the girls could carouse in peace without impudent waiters calling attention to their every youthful peccadillo and the tabloids (we plead guilty!) examining their every royal move.
The international headlines are relentless — vacationing Mike Clark-Madison reports that the Great Chuy’s Bust even made page 5 of the Trinidad Express. But we can thank the Austin American-Statesman (after a slow, reluctant start) for exhausting the J&B Bust story with five — count ’em, five — reporters working the big page 1, top-of-the-fold copyrighted exclusive (“From the start, a most unusual case involving the Bush twins,” June 8), documenting the fact that the girls have now done their part to highlight the hypocrisy of our underage drinking laws. Bully for them. If the special-treatment-in-progress to keep them safely clear of jail time makes it slightly less likely that Dad’s sanctimonious “three-strikes” teenage alcohol law receives continuing enforcement, the girls have done a public service — akin to Monica Lewinsky making the world a little more safe for fellatio. (Curiously, the Statesman article made no mention of a June 1 report in the Houston Chronicle that Jenna also has a December 31, 1997, incident recorded of some kind from the TABC, making this potentially her third offense, and carrying at least the possibility of jail time.)
I don’t blame the president’s editor for this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t story (hell, if the Chronicle had five reporters to spare, we’d be on it like Rich Oppel on Princess Diana) but it did seem a bit churlish to suggest that Chuy’s manager politely lecture the president’s daughters and send them on their way. No doubt the manager is now wishing she had done so: The Bush girls get embarrassed, and she gets death threats from right-wing yahoos.
But rank carries a certain noblesse oblige.
George W. was the governor of personal responsibility, who never tired of lecturing his constituents on how best to raise their children and what those children could expect from the authorities should they get out of line. After inventing more ways early in his tenure to throw juveniles in jail, during his last Texas race he campaigned on the charming notion that if parents eligible for welfare should break the law, that state should respond by starving their children. With all apologies to Jenna and Barbara, in those circumstances it is difficult to feel much sympathy for White House demands that the media consider the Bush daughters’ misbehavior simply “a family matter.”
Since he ran for National Preacher, it is only fitting that in return Bush should now be required to endure his own warmed-over sermons.
Reform for Working Stiffs
Campaign finance reform as currently conceived is often an argument of the rich, by the rich, among the rich. The Fannie Lou Hamer Project, based in Kalamazoo and Atlanta, is a campaign finance reform with a difference. Named after the legendary civil rights activist who led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1964, the Project subjects all reforms to the “political equality” standard: “How far does this reform really go in making the system fair for someone like Fannie Lou Hamer — a passionate leader, a woman, a person of color, a person of little means?”
The Project comes to Austin Monday night, June 18, in the person of Stephanie Wilson, executive director, who will speak at 7pm on “The Color of Money: A Civil Rights Issue” at the King-Seabrook Chapel of Huston-Tillotson College. Wilson will be followed by a panel discussion including Rep. Dawnna Dukes, Rev. Sterling Lands, Gerald Torres of the UT Law School, and Susan Paynter of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission.
Fred Lewis of Campaigns for People, hosting the event, says the Project is “educating people about the connection between voting rights, civil rights, and the campaign finance system. If you have the right to vote, and you exercise it — but the structures of our democratic institutions are such that your vote isn’t translated into political power — then you don’t really have full voting rights.”
For more information, call 472-1007. 
This article appears in June 15 • 2001.
