It should surprise no one that Texas has especially hard penalties for its prisoners: Former Texas governor Rick Perry practically fueled his political campaigns on a platform of iron-hard criminal justice remedies to societal problems, and a spate of recent exonerations of falsely imprisoned individuals produced in the wake of advances in DNA testing have done little to shift the Governor’s zeal for capital punishment as a means to an end.
State-Sanctioned Injustice
Whether Perry’s reputation can continue to weather the storm of recent scandals is anyone’s guess. By even Perry’s standards of punishment, however, the case of Cameron Todd Willingham at the hands of an overzealous prosecutor and an oblivious legal system is draconian in the extreme. Accused of murdering his three daughters by purposefully setting his house on fire, Willingham had a case that was stacked against him from the beginning, with prosecutor John Jackson resting his prosecution on what is now perceived to be junk science. An excoriating study of the case in a 2009 issue of The New Yorker showed just how flimsy the case against Willingham was, and Perry came heavily under fire at the time for the possibility that he had put to death an innocent man.
A Wake-Up Call on Legal Ethics
According to a new article in Deadstate.org, Jackson is now coming under attack yet again for hiding exculpating evidence and bribing a key witness in Willingham’s case with a lenient jail sentence. Willingham was executed in 2004, at the height of Perry’s governorship, and new evidence shows that the facts may have exonerated Willingham had the prosecutor of the case followed the ethical guidelines of his profession, and had Perry fully done his job as governor.
Jackson now faces sanctions from the state bar of Texas, meaning that he could face disbarment, while Governor Perry’s “shoot first and ask questions later”-style of criminal justice may further tarnish his legacy. What is clear is that a legal system that is based on political connections and a need-to-win mentality may have killed an innocent father of three, and that a new dialogue on the death penalty may need to come to the fore in 2015.