Politics
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For those of you who may have missed the New Yorker article that shined a respected national spotlight on it. Or the coverage of the political shenanigans spawned by its faults. Or any of the articles about the increasing mess it seems to be making for current Texas Governor Rick Perry and his bid for a third term.
Okay: So, for those of you who have placed yourselves on something of a domestic U.S. news embargo over the past few weeks, NPR offered a nice summation of the Cameron Todd Willingham case this past Wednesday. Willingham, as most of you will remember, is the guy who was put to death in the nation’s busiest death chamber after years of innocence claims and despite some actual proof, which some argue was of the variety that might have lead to an eventual exoneration. In the wake of all of this, death penalty opponents find themselves in the morbidly awkward sort of position usually reserved for the beatifiers of assassinated heads of state and their subsequently idolized ilk: Robbed of a chance to see the full-realization of their subject’s potential (in Willingham’s case, his theoretical exoneration), they are forced to salvage what they can from death. For anti-death-penalty crusaders, Willingham’s execution might (despite Dahlia Lithwick’s Slate-published assertion that the Constitution offers no comfort for properly convicted innocent death row inmates) be just the sort of test case that they’ve been waiting for — something that could be pointed to in court as evidence that innocent people fall victim to the U.S. death penalty. When they find that case — and if it results in a second nationwide ban on capital punishment — things could get ugly in Texas.
NPR’s John Burnett, the reporter who authored that summation of the Willingham case mentioned above, was spot-on when he called the death penalty “sacrosanct” in the mind of Texans. Here, as Burnett pointed out, “upwards of 70 percent of the population support[s] it” and “[n]o serious candidate from either party runs against it.” There are, of course, the color-coded-state explanations of this fact — that Texas is a state with a decidedly conservative bent, and that in such states, support for the death penalty is stronger than it is elsewhere. But there seems to be further reason that Burnett used a synonym for inviolable when describing this state’s attraction (addiction?) to execution, and these have something more to do with identity than any sort of ideology.
As any politically aware citizen of the United States — and, on two occasions, the world — can tell you, Texans like their elected officials to be of the folksy variety: Lyndon Johnson gave visiting dignitaries tours of his ranch from the backseat of his Lincoln Continental convertible, Ann Richards rode her Harley around Austin, Dubya’s entire public persona was based on what was presented as a simple, black-and-white worldview. Almost every public official sports some kind of cowboy gear, no matter the amount of time that they spend behind a desk. These are all acts of homage — a very public kow-towing to the Gus McCrea/Woodrow Call character-ideal that lives inside of so many Texans — and, in return for them, Great Staters (and, on two occasions, game U.S. citizens) offer-up a whole variety of public offices.
The trouble here is that, as part of their cultivated cowboy image, latter-day Austin-bound Virginians can’t part with the folksy judicial elegance offered by capital punishment. With it, a guilty party is dispatched — granted, not as quickly as some cowboys might otherwise have liked, but dispatched, nonetheless — in ideal fashion; justice wears the white hat we’d like it to, and the bad guy is forced to submit to its will. It’s a simple treatment for the plague of extreme crime, one not adequately addressed by the here-relative complexities of the prison system. It’s not quite kill ‘em all, but it’s close. And as long as the cowboy remains the figure most ideally suited for public office in Texas, it’ll stay that way.
Which is why Willingham — and any future would-be exoner-ite — never had a chance. And it’s why secession is more likely to find its way into the state of Texas’ agenda than a moratorium on (let alone, the outlawing of) executions.
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