Daniel Perry Freed
Photo by Austin Police Department
I suppose it was inevitable:
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas on Thursday pardoned a man who was convicted of fatally shooting a protester during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in the summer of 2020, fulfilling a promise he made last year amid pressure from conservatives.
The decision immediately followed a pardon recommendation from the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose members are appointed by the governor. Lawyers for the man, Daniel S. Perry, argued that he had acted in self-defense against the protester, who was carrying an AK-47-style rifle.
Mr. Perry was sentenced to 25 years in prison in an emotional hearing last year in which prosecutors presented evidence of racist online comments he had made and said that psychological experts had found him to be “basically a loaded gun.” As the pardons board considered the case, lawyers with the Travis County district attorney, José Garza, met with the board to argue against a pardon.
Abbott is also trying to remove Garza from office, utilizing a new Texas law that allows the governor to remove prosecutors who aren’t pursuing his agenda. Garza has said he will not prosecute people under Texas’ new abortion law and has pressing charges against abusive law enforcement officials. The Perry case became a flashpoint for Abbott’s campaign against Garza.
I have little to add to what Andrew Fleischman and David Thornton said about this case when Perry was first convicted. This is a man who told people he wanted to kill BLM protesters, then drove his car into a crowd and did it. His case for self-defense rests on the idea that the mere act of carrying an AK-47, a legal act, justifies a “Stand Your Ground” defense. But the law can not simultaneously allow open carry and allow the mere carrying of a weapon to justify self-defense. Under this logic, the protesters who attacked Kyle Rittenhouse, who was openly carrying an AR-15, were justified in doing so, a position the Right Wing would never endorse.
But the debate over the legal ins-and-outs of the case misses the larger point: this has nothing to do with self-defense. And it never did. This case is about who was shot and who did the shooting. In the Rittenhouse case, the Right Wing sided with him because he shot BLM protesters. That the facts and the law were on his side is a coincidence. In the Perry case, the Right Wing sided with him because he also shot a BLM protester. The thing that unifies the two cases is not the law, the facts or logic: it’s the violence being deployed against a political movement the GOP doesn’t like.
Hysterical? Let’s keep in mind that in recent years the GOP has been passing a slew of laws designed to crack down on protesters, including laws in several states that allow motorists to run down protesters with impunity. Let’s keep in mind that the GOP nominee for president has proposed using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protesters he doesn’t like. Of course, this only applies to left wing protesters. When it comes to right wing protesters, such as the ones who stormed the Capitol on January 6, the GOP is increasingly holding them up as heroes and promising to pardon them all. Had Perry opened fire on a “stop the steal” rally, I have no doubt the same people cheering his release would be calling for his execution.
It is a dangerous path we are following right now, one that leads to essentially the legalization of extrajudicial violence (something our nation has a bit of a history on). But I don’t see any interest in the Republican Party for turning away from this path. And thus I expect things to get worse. I expect them to get a lot worse.
Police keeping the peace is *VERY* important. If they don’t keep the peace, stuff like this happens.
I’ll try to make an analogy. Every so often, there’s a discussion about a hypothetical homeowner shooting a hypothetical burglar in the middle of the night.
On the one side, there’s usually an argument about how the homeowner shouldn’t care more about his own stuff than about the life of a human being.
This usually gets a response like “the burglar cares more about the homeowner’s stuff than his own life, why should the homeowner disagree?”
There is a giant leap to “but murder is wrong!” that seems to completely ignore the whole “you shouldn’t burgle” thing. Preventing burglars has a side effect of preventing burglars from being shot by homeowners in the middle of the night.
If you have enough burglars, eventually one of them is going to get shot and the argument that has “We Have A Social Contract!” as its foundation is an argument that *NEEDS* to take into account that the social contract also talks about burglary.
So, too, here. It’s not enough for the cops to make sure that the protests are mostly peaceful. We saw that with Rittenhouse.
We’re seeing it here with Perry.Report
And in each case what else would you have had them do to the shooters to “keep the peace?”Report
It’s one of those things where the violence happens around step 12 or 13 in the process. “What do you think they should have done to prevent step 11?”
There’s plenty of stuff. Do you want to discuss Step 3? Step 8? Step 10?
Because if we jump all the way to Step 12 and start complaining about Step 13 being inappropriate… well, I suppose I can understand the inclination. But that stuff had been coming for a while.Report
I want you to make a clear statement regarding this case about whatever step you think the cops got wrong and what you believe they should or could do differently. Otherwise you need to stop opening doors you have no intention of walking through.Report
Keep the protests peacefully assembled. Remove the bad apples from the mix.
If you allow the protest to become chaotic, the protest will become chaotic. Then we’ll be able to complain about the outcomes of chaotic protests.
The game is iterated.Report
Which protestors in the Perry case had become chaotic without removal?Report
The Austin Texas BLM protests that lasted weeks? There’s a wikipedia page dedicated to their unruliness here.
2020 was a powderkeg. Do you not remember that?Report
I do.
But we aren’t discussing every protest in 2020 nor even the weeks of protests in Austin. We are discussing one case – the BLM protest where Mr. Perry committed murder. Your contention just above is that the police had allowed that protest on that day to become chaotic, which you seem to think leads to the conclusion that chaos should have been expected – and that said chaos seems to perhaps have given Mr. Perry an excuse. So I’ll ask again – Which protestors in the Perry case had become chaotic without removal?
Because if you are going to suggest – as you did at the start o fthe thread – that the cops missed a chance to had this off by allowing chaos, you need to do a far better job of describing the chaos you believe existed that night and why the cops are now somehow to blame for Mr. Perry killing Mr. Foster.Report
Adding open carry to the mix certainly did not help anyone (except Perry).Report
The difference between “open carry” (something 100% constitutional) and “brandishing” (something 100% illegal) has never been hammered out.
And that’s without getting into the question of “one man’s carrying is another man’s brandishing”.
Perry’s case is especially egregious because it certainly looks like he was looking for a fight and then found one.
I would say that this case is completely different from the Rittenhouse case.
But part of my assumption in that is that the Rittenhouse case was decided correctly.
When situations are allowed to descend into chaos, chaos is what you’re going to get.
It happened last time, it happened this time, and it’s gonna happen next time.Report
I think what should have happened was when people called 911 saying “there’s a mob of guys running around with rifles, can someone come down here”, the police should have gone down there.Report
Which case are you referring to – the Rittenhouse case where he walked past the cops, tried to surrender and then was waved on? Or this one where a a publicly avowed racist told people he was going to go kill BLM protestors and then did so after crashing his car into a permitted BLM protest where army veterans were following Texas laws regarding open carry?Report
Phil, if you want to argue that the cops should have jugged Rittenhouse instead of letting him wander around toting a rifle, I’m right there with you.Report
If you want free speech then its best not to have people murdered for speaking freely.
If you want guns to widely available and carried openly then you should be able to do that without getting murdered.
Abbot is virtue signalling to his fans that it’s just ducky to kill the right kind of people. The NRA doesn’t care if gun owners get shot.Report
“What about the right to peacefully assemble?”, we can ask, sweeping our hand as we show the riot.Report
Where was the riot in this case?Report
There was only violence in small pockets!Report
That night, there was violence in one pocket only, and that was the one in which Perry drove into the protestors, who were peaceful to a person, and then shot one of them.
Now, I suppose we could stipulate that anyone who carries a gun anywhere is, by definition, not being peaceful, and I’m willing to so stipulate, as long as we then apply it across the board.
But that night (and in fact, almost every night here) there had been no property destruction, no clashes with counterprotestors or police, or anything to indicate that what was going on was a riot, and not a peaceful protest. None of this is in dispute (and there’s plenty of video from that night, and every night, in Austin, as a few journalists and “journalists” were always there filming, so it’s not like we can’t see for ourselves). So I’m not sure why you feel the need to call it a riot. Perhaps it is your way of validating your own beliefs about the cause of the protests or the character of the people protesting (full disclosure: while I was not there that night, I had attended earlier protests in Austin)?Report
Now, I suppose we could stipulate that anyone who carries a gun anywhere is, by definition, not being peaceful, and I’m willing to so stipulate, as long as we then apply it across the board.
And therein is the nut.
What are we willing to stipulate across the board?
I don’t think that Perry is “innocent” nor that he deserves a pardon.
But we’re kinda past that at this point.
Reason, of all magazines, has a good article on this:
I keep iterating this out and I’m not seeing good stuff come from it.
(But I’m glad you got a chance to get out during the lockdown. I was mostly housebound, other than jogging.)Report
Being outside with people (at protests, or the park, or someone’s backyard) was one of the few things that made the lockdown bearable, and with minimal risk, made even more minimal in the protest case by the fact that the majority of people there when I was were wearing masks.Report
“Perry drove into the protestors, who were peaceful to a person, and then shot one of them.”
ah-heh, “peaceful to a person”? I guess that doesn’t include the ones pointing their guns at bystanders (Foster was not the only armed man in the crowd that night.)Report
Who was pointing guns at bystanders?
Foster was not the only armed man in the crowd that night.
This is true. After the police attacked protestors in the first days of the protests, the Boogaloo Boys, of which Foster was aligned, if not a member, showed up to pretty much all of them armed. It’s worth noting that the Boogaloo Boys are a far right group whose affinity with the BLM protesters was largely a result of their shared animosity towards the police.
For a bit of additional context, armed protestors in Austin are a long-standing fact of life. For many years, going back to at least the late-Aughts (the first time I saw them was in ’08 or ’09), armed groups of various politics, right and left, would march through downtown during large events like SXSW. If you attend large events in Austin, you just have to get used to them, which of course doesn’t mean getting comfortable with them. When, e.g., the Huey P. Newton Gun Club marched down 6th Street during the height of SXSW music every year, the crowd definitely got a bit quieter for a few minutes, but nobody panicked, because you knew they were gonna show up eventually. Hell, going to Walmart or the dog park in Austin occasionally means running into people open carrying.Report
Lots of people at protests point guns at other people. Granted they are usually cops, but its still across the “violence” threshold you seem to be hinting at.Report
So this story appears to mention one protestor who waved a muzzle in a bystander’s direction.
But… just to be 1000% clear, it is your contention that “pointing at a gun at someone” is inherently not peaceful, correct?
Does that extend to police officers pointing their guns at people? If not, well, I guess the word “inherent” is no longer applicable.Report
“So this story appears to mention one protestor who waved a muzzle in a bystander’s direction.”
are…you honestly so dedicated to Team Blue that you are now arguing that pointing a gun at someone is not threatening behavior
“Does that extend to police officers pointing their guns at people?”
…yes?
Kazzy, I’m surprised to find that you haven’t spoken on the subject of smacking your wife around. Obviously you don’t consider that to be problematic at all, otherwise you’d have made sure we understood you disagree with it.Report
Ah, so one witness says one person may or may not have pointed a gun in the general direction of a bystander, therefore it’s hilarious to say it was a peaceful protest. That’s about the level of reasoning I have come to expect here.Report
“so one witness says one person may or may not have pointed a gun in the general direction of a bystander, therefore it’s hilarious to say it was a peaceful protest.”
just a few bad apples don’t spoil the whole barrel, huh?
although you’ve gone so far off your meds that you’re now defending the Boogaloo Boys from a liberal direction, so.Report
amusing to see the “dude was open-carrying a rifle in the middle of a riot, he deserved what he got” crowd flip because said dude was on their team.Report
Indeed.Report
And the people in the, “Dude was carrying his gun for self-protection when he was attacked and the attackers therefore deserve to suffer every consequence for the choices they make as people attacking law-abiding gun owners,” flip because attacker was on THEIR team.Report
Carl Schmitt wrote a book called “The Concept of the Political”.
In it, he argued that the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.
If you want something in this hemisphere, we’ve got Óscar Benavides saying “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”.
Above Chris argues:
What are we willing to apply across the board?
Because if we scream “THIS IS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE!” when THEY do something and “well, you have to understand…” when someone on our side does something, we shouldn’t be surprised when we start seeing that attitude popping up across the board.Report
“What are we willing to apply across the board?”
That it is an abuse of power when politicians pardon guilty people merely for political reason.Report
Is refusing to prosecute in the same ballpark as pardoning?Report
You asked what I was willing to apply across the board.
I answered.
If you want to propose something else be applied across the board, be my guest.
But in order to apply something across the board… it needs to be a ‘thing’. Not a bunch of things that may be in the same ballpark.Report
i think what kazzy is saying here is that the thing we need to apply across the board is looking at each situation individually based on circumstances.Report
Good to know you believe Gov. Abbot used his pardon power appropriately.Report
No. I said what I said.Report
So, no?Report
I said what I said.
If you want to discuss something different, say whatever you want to say.Report
Eh, I see it as falling under the umbrella of “deliberate miscarriages of justice on the part of the authorities”.
A governor who uses the pardon power inappropriately is different from a prosecutor failing to prosecute a criminal, sure.
But in both cases you’ve got a guy not in jail who should be.Report
So make your claim. Answer your own question.Report
Prosecutors refusing to go after criminals reminds me of everything I dislike about QI for police.
It’s the authorities abusing their authority in the service of injustice.
And it’s making the world worse.
The iterated game keeps having defections in it. Perry’s isn’t the first one. It’s merely the latest one.Report
Here is what you asked: “What are we willing to apply across the board?”
So… what are YOU willing to apply across the board?Report
The Rule of Law?Report
Kazzy
why are you acting like Jaybird thinks Perry should not be in jailReport
Well lets see – does that mean we should hope Texans now attempt to run the governor out of office for using his discretion? Which FWIW is what the Governor is trying to do to the prosecutor who secured this conviction . . . .Report
We can absolutely hope that.
The only thing worse than an executive failing to use the pardon power appropriately is one using it inappropriately.Report
There’s no inconsistency in a presupposition against illegal protesters.Report
I’m not sure any presupposition is necessary when the facts aren’t in dispute. The question was whether the shoot met the definition of self defense under one of the laxest statutes in the country. A jury in Texas said it didn’t.Report
“And the people in the, “Dude was carrying his gun for self-protection when he was attacked…”
were there very many people here saying that Rittenhouse acted appropriately, with restraint, and deserved no censure for his actions? I really do not recall that. Perhaps you could find us some.Report
At least Perry was a resident of the city he shot someone in.Report
If I’m understanding your analogy here, the dead man is the “burglar”?Report
That’s certainly how I read it. Though as you will note Jaybird seems to be running in every direction BUT that one.Report
I think that, in this case, Garrett Foster is the guy who had every single right to be where he was with an assault rifle and Daniel Perry was the burglar who shot him claiming that the homeowner made him feel threatened.
And then Perry got pardoned by the governor. An “activist” governor, let’s call him.Report
I wouldn’t have let this dude out. He had his day in court and the jury decided what it decided. The entire situation is consistent with the warnings and admonishments given when I got my carry permit. When you carry a weapon, regardless of what the law says, you have made yourself a target. That’s just a fact. Make sure it is worth it, up to and including the possibility of ending up dead due to the error, foolishness, or death wish of someone else. If you use the weapon, make sure it is also worth being prosecuted, going to prison, and putting your life in the hands of 12 total strangers.Report
Except that when you have a governor willing to pardon a convicted shooter largely for political reasons, all that goes out the window.Report
That’s what elections and impeachment are for resolving. If he was pandering, and probably was, he’s probably safe, but you never know. But I expect there are worse examples of governors pardoning the convicted.Report
Do enlighten us.Report
I’m not going to assert that all of the governors in this link are worse but there’s quite a few here that are pretty damn eyerolling. This took about 1 minute to find and 3 to scan it….
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/us/matt-bevin-pardons-kentucky.htmlReport
Thinking about this over the weekend, it’s just the next iteration after promising to pardon others who commit political violence the GOP supports. After years of hearing TFG saying he would pardon the January 6th Insurrectionists, this really should surprise no one. Though I do find it telling that none of our hard right commenters are willing to (yet) come defend this.Report
Here’s a fun defense: “The Constitution allows for Governors to issue pardons!”
(Now it’s an argument over whether or not the rules allow for this.)
“Are you saying that governors shouldn’t be able to issue pardons?”
(This one even begins with “are you saying…”)Report
I’m saying I want one or more of our resident right wingers to tell me in clear, plain explicit terms why this is an OK pardon? Meaning are they willing to defend the racial and political violence this person opening committed, and for which he was tried and convicted by a jury of his peers under existing law. The governor’s pardon powers are the least of the issues here.Report
What about Marc Rich?
Anyway, you’re probably not going to get that. You might get someone to tell you to google a picture of “Garrett Foster”. (As for pardoning guilty people… most of the people pardoned have been tried/convicted. That’s part of the whole process of the pardon. People who haven’t been don’t need pardons. Nixon, I suppose, is a glaring counter-example but that’s not the norm for pardons.)Report
So just to be clear you are OK with the pardon power being deployed here so that an avowed racist can get away with killing a black man who was legally carrying after the racist plowed his car into a protest that was not – until that point – violent? That’s a line in the sand you won’t draw?Report
A black man? Have you seen a picture of Garrett Foster?
Anyway, I am not “OK” with it. I see it as a clear defection in the iterated game. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has violated something similar to “the social contract” in pardoning Daniel Perry and is, 100%, violating norms.
100%.Report
Thanks for that. You might have wanted to start there . . .Report
If that’s where you believe that this started, I can see why you’d want others to start there too.Report
I prefer people to clearly state whether they support an outcome on which they are commenting or not. Seems to actually get to better conversations then arm waving.
But you certainly keep doing you.Report
For what it’s worth, I’m probably opposed to the next five or six outcomes that follow from this.Report
Where do you believe that it started?Report
Mesopotamia.Report
“I’m saying I want one or more of our resident right wingers to tell me in clear, plain explicit terms why this is an OK pardon?”
Why do you think we believe this was an OK pardon?Report
Well so far you are one of only two seriously objecting . . . and from the disjointed way you and Jaybird objected it appears to be more of a process question then a moral one.Report
I see it as the latest event in an iterated game as opposed to an isolated incident that can be removed from all context, including the context of the whole “social contract” thing.
I imagine that if I got out a microscope and insisted that it needs to be looked at as a single event, it’d be incomprehensible as well as an obvious betrayal of the duties of a government official.Report
So yes, your objection is process not morality. Got it.Report
Yeah, if you’re not familiar with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, my thinking is probably opaque.Report
Your thinking is opaque because you choose to write it that way. Tossing random references to a game theory concept instead of actually describing how you see things – or ruminating about defections in an iterated game (also a game theory concept) rather then ask questions as they are actually posed is the problem – I suspect rooted in your theory of mind being so … niched … that a a forest full of intellectual trees presents real problems, especially when the trees are ignoring you digressions because they are not answers to even the questions you have asked.Report
“Random”.
Yeah. “Why does he keep bringing up cooperation and defection? We’re trying to talk about a guy shooting a protestor during a BLM rally!”Report
See you think that set of sentences means something. Unless you are going to clearly describe how and why cooperation and defection are applicable, and who is playing what part, then tossing out the concept of cooperation and defection from an iterated game makes … very little sense to nearly anyone besides you.
I know it blows your mind, but most humans – and certainly all the normies – don’t think about or discuss or analyze any of this stuff using game theory or its terms. And frankly a right wing racist shooting someone during a Black Lives Matter protest seems like a logical iteration of the racist construct in America to me. So Perry clearly wasn’t defecting.
And yet you aren’t even willing to be that clear in your writing. it took Kazzy what – 4 questions, five? to get you to admit you wanted the rule of law applied equally – in response to your own question about what should be applied equally.Report
I assumed that people would read the sentences in the context of other sentences that have been written.
For example:
The argument against Daniel Perry’s pardon relies rather heavily on stuff like “the social contract”.
Seriously, it does.
And that’s why these are important distinctions.
I mean, the original post makes a distinction between Perry and Rittenhouse.
Do *YOU* see a difference between Perry and Rittenhouse?
If you don’t, can you wrap your head around the idea how someone else might see a difference between Perry and Rittenhouse?Report
I see a number of similarities, most notably that Perry and Rittenhouse went volitionally to places they had no business being, armed, to insert themselves into the situation. They also discharged their firearms needlessly, killing people they had no need or business killing.
There is a difference in alleged motivation between the two, and there are certainly differences how they were arrested and tried, to say nothing of their convictions.
What differences do you see? And why do you reduce the argument against Daniel Perry’s pardon to a social contract violation instead of an immoral political act?Report
Yeah, it’s weird. I can comprehend how someone could look at them and say “it’s exactly the same!”.
It’s not a particularly flattering comprehension, but it’s there.
You don’t seem to comprehend how someone, even the guy in the original post, sees a substantial difference.Report
I know I have said this before – failing to agree to the difference someone else points out doesn’t mean I can’t comprehend that the OP (or you) sees a difference. I don’t, for instance, think either the facts or the law was on Rittenhouse’s side. Thus my assessment disagrees with the OP. That says precisely nothing about whether I can accept that the OP reaches a different conclusion.Report
I don’t, for instance, think either the facts or the law was on Rittenhouse’s side.
I’m not sure that we agree on what the facts were.
Did Rittenhouse’s mother drive him to Kenosha?
Was the gun charge against Rittenhouse dropped inappropriately?
I know that, in the Daniel Perry case, you asked me about Perry shooting a black man.
We may have different starting facts.
It doesn’t surprise me that we end up in different places.Report
Yes
I believe it was.
That was an error on my part that I have corrected in every comment since, and would correct in the initial comment, but I don’t have that kid of WordPress-fu.Report
Regarding Rittenhouse’s mother.
Regarding the gun charge.
We seem to have different facts.
It’s not surprising that we have different conclusions.Report
I wonder if the prosecutors ever went after his friend for making a straw purchase.Report
I haven’t heard anything about such a case and, for months, Rittenhouse was such a good news-maker and click-generator that I can’t help but think that if the prosecutors had, it would have been worth reporting on semi-loudly as a way to wring some justice out of the rags of the original trial.Report
1) I sit corrected.
2) I still think the charge was wrongly tossed.
We have mostly the same facts. Still doesn’t mean we will arrive at the same conclusions. And frankly the fact that he testified to driving himself to a place he didn’t need to be to retrieve a weapon he may or may not have had the right to possess, to go and insert himself in a situation where he had no business and then shot someone he had no right or need to shoot still means there’s more in common with Perry then not.Report
So you have the *IMPORTANT* facts right. The trivial ones that don’t matter can be wrong and it’s fine?
Fair enough.
Do you see how someone else might think that the charge was appropriately tossed? Or, at least, that the prosecutors were correct in not fighting against the charge being tossed?
(After this, I’m going to ask about different people weighing different facts differently, based on different priors, if you want to head that off at the pass.)Report
“it took Kazzy what – 4 questions, five? to get you to admit you wanted the rule of law applied equally”
it took him 4 questions because he was starting out with the charitable assumption that Kazzy was willing and able to think for himselfReport
Jaybird asked a question. Kazzy answered it in his initial reply. Jaybird then asked another question that seemed to be a deflection from the first, and certainly didn’t represent what – we would come to find out four answers later – was Jaybird’s answer to his own question.
I am unsure how that equates to Kazzy not thinking for himself.Report
I agree. This is the issue, legally and politically speaking. Things could, indeed, get a lot worse.Report
Ok, so here are some bullet points:
1. When somebody sets fire to a convenience store, they should be prosecuted.
2. When somebody grazes their cattle on Federal lands illegally, they should be prosecuted.
3. When somebody enters the country illegally, they should be prosecuted.
4. When somebody tries to overturn the result of a legally conducted election, they should be prosecuted.
5. When somebody steals highly confidential documents from the government, lies about whether they have them, hides them from people trying to recover them, handles them carelessly, and shows them to other people, they should be prosecuted.
6. When somebody shoots someone else without provocation or cause, they should be prosecuted.
If you want to separate the above statements into different piles and endorse some and not others, you are participating in the dismantling of rule of law. This makes you, as far as I am concerned, a possible enemy of America and everything I love about my own home country.Report
Hear, hear!Report
Things you wouldn’t believe would need to be said in this country, but here we are.Report
Don’t look up what happened to the guy who argued “The political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.”Report
A long life and provider of the intellectual underpinnings of John Woo’s thought?Report
Carl Schmitt.
The Nazis weren’t bad because they were Nazis. The Nazis were bad because they acted as if “The political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.”Report
Dang it, Yoo.Report
This is hilarious to me, because I’ve never heard of John Yoo, and I thought you went really obscure with a reference to the acclaimed director of action movies.Report
Y’all are letting people young enough not to have heard of John Yoo comment here?Report
7. When someone performs, or facilitates, an abortion illegally, they should be prosecuted…?
Because that’s the actual “defection” in the “iterated game” that is driving Abbot to go after Granza, and this pardon is partly about that
Because I don’t think I should be required to endorse Texas’s tyrannical approach to abortion in order to say that it’s bad for Abbot to endorse the politically motivated murder of left-wing protesters.Report
You used the word “illegally” so by definition, yes they should be prosecuted. The law isn’t as uniform on this matter as on the other six though.Report
Maybe, but I don’t think I’d be alone in thinking (to choose a less charged example) that a prosecutor who didn’t go after someone for grazing cattle on Federal land was skirting the edge of dangerous lawlessness, and I would be unconcerned and unsurprised to hear about someone being pardoned for such activity.
Like I think the malum prohibitum vs malum in se distinction is basically a sensible one and it’s applicable and important here.Report
For my friends, malum prohibitum. For my enemies, malum in se!Report
pillsy, the guys who grazed cattle on Federal land were shot by the FBI.Report
There were important intervening steps… and more than zero problems with the shooting based on my reading in the linked article and elsewhereReport
you suggested that you thought “…a prosecutor who didn’t go after someone for grazing cattle on Federal land was skirting the edge of dangerous lawlessness[.]”
and it’s important to remember that they did shoot the guys who did it. that was a thing that happened. you wanna say “well I just thought they should have taken them to court” sure, me too, but they very much did kill the guys who grazed cattle on Federal lands.Report
right, because breaking the law to graze illegally on public lands entitles you to shoot at federal authorities coming to arrest you for ignoring first the grazing bills, and then the arrest warrants. But all that was OK conduct – it’s the big bad feds who created the problem . . . .Report
Where did DensityDuck even imply that?Report
My first reply wasn’t very good so I’m going to take a second bite at the apple because why not.
If you want to separate the above statements into different piles and endorse some and not others, you are participating in the dismantling of rule of law.
I think this is both normatively and descriptively incorrect. I think if you fail to prosecute 1, 4, and/or 6, you are edging towards a precipice that places liberal democracy in danger, and if you fail to prosecute 2 and 4, you really are doing no such thing.[1]
The difference is the qualifier “illegally”. If you gun down a protester because you disagree with their politics, you should be prosecuted. If you can’t be prosecuted for it because doing that isn’t illegal, that is, in fact, a sign that something has gone seriously wrong with your society.
This isn’t true with immigration or grazing on Federal lands.
[1] I’m skipping over 3 because it drags in so many aggravating factors because of the perpetrator’s idiocy, arrogance, and corruption.Report
Failing to prosecute illegal immigration? Absolutely a sign of societal disintegration.Report
And which resources would you reroute form other functions to address this? Are you willing to see your taxes go up to address this?Report
I demand that we find out nothing more about the sea. (It’s a joke. Lighten up.)Report
I actually think this inadvertently gets to the root of the larger issue, which is lawlessness or failure to enforce the law as a deliberate form of policy making by other means. Our system needs some discretion, and sometimes exercising that discretion in a generous way is the difference between justice and injustice. However at a certain point failure to enforce becomes a rejection of our form of government, and democracy itself.Report
Do you believe Homeland Security has the necessary funds to fully enforce current law? Because they don’t think so, and if they are right, there will have to be a legislative fix to that.Report
A more serious answer is I’d be willing to see a cut in entitlements and an increase in taxes. But the overall cost would be minimized if we (a) used our trade, diplomatic, and covert power to stabilize Central and South America, and (b) used our current structure to enforce the current laws.Report
No argument out of me on Point A – liberals have been directly saying we helped break South and Central America we should help fix it for about 20 years.
Your point B gets at what I was asking originally, and at the major flaw in the system now. For starters since Congress controls the “power of the purse,” federal agencies are not allowed to reprogram or move more the 5% of their budgets to a different purpose in a given fiscal year. That translates in to limited abilities for the Executive to use more resources in our current structure to enforce current laws. And we would need more resources because we need more judges, more intake and processing people, and better computer systems to handle the current inflow of people.
As to your ideas about cutting earned benefits – while the press plays fast and loose with the terms, the money collected for these things via payroll taxes can’t be used for other purposes anyway, so cutting earned benefits won’t free up money to be used in this fashion. Again Congress could deal with that legislatively but so far they have chosen to stick their heads in the proverbial sand on all this.
And finally – NOAA goes on the chopping block every 6-8 years anyway, until people realize we house the National Weather Service. Then mysteriously we are fine.Report
I’m not saying the executive branch should do it on their own.Report
And yet Congress keeps being very unwilling to adjust the parts of the situation squarely in their lane. And they get reelected for it.Report
I’m also not trying to score points for any particular team. You asked me what I’d accept, and I answered it. You don’t have to run it through a Democratic Defense Algorithm.Report
And I appreciate the answer. I was trying to further the discussion by pointing out the existing roadblocks – and their owners – for your approach. I would think there is fruitful.Report
But if you aren’t prosecuting someone for immigrating because there isn’t anything illegal about how they immigrated, that’s not a sign of societal disintegration!
Whereas if you aren’t prosecuting someone for shooting protesters they disagree with because there isn’t anything illegal about doing that, you’ve got much bigger problems!Report
“This malum is malum in se!”
“No! It’s malum prohibitum!”
“No! It’s malum in se!”
“No! It’s malum prohibitum!”Report
The example 3 was illegal.Report