roger hollander

 A funny thing happened at the Republican debate at the Reagan
Library in California on Wednesday night, when the evening’s co-moderator Brian
Williams asked a question of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. (Not funny ha-ha, funny
peculiar.)

For the text oriented among us, here’s what transpired.

WILLIAMS: Governor Perry, a question about Texas. Your state has executed 234
death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. Have you…

(APPLAUSE)

Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those
might have been innocent?

PERRY: No, sir. I’ve never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas has
a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place of which — when someone commits
the most heinous of crimes against our citizens, they get a fair hearing, they
go through an appellate process, they go up to the Supreme Court of the United
States, if that’s required.

But in the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of our
children, you kill a police officer, you’re involved with another crime and you
kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of
Texas, and that is, you will be executed.

WILLIAMS: What do you make of…

(APPLAUSE)

What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the
execution of 234 people drew applause?

PERRY: I think Americans understand justice. I think Americans are clearly,
in the vast majority of — of cases, supportive of capital punishment. When you
have committed heinous crimes against our citizens — and it’s a state-by-state
issue, but in the state of Texas, our citizens have made that decision, and they
made it clear, and they don’t want you to commit those crimes against our
citizens. And if you do, you will face the ultimate justice.

For some — in this case, opponents of the death penalty — this was sort of a
double whiplash moment, a gasp within a gasp that may have been more confusing
than mobilizing. Because which was more disturbing (or heartening, depending on
your political view)? Perry’s unbowed defense of the “thoughtful” trial process
in Texas and the clear expression of his untroubled mind in the face of possible
moral doubt and complexity (i.e., Have I facilitated the death of an innocent
human?)? Or the audience applause that bracketed the exchange, the rousing
audience cheers for an aggressively applied death penalty? In California, mind
you, not Texas.

Let’s look at the applause, the “execution cheer,” if you will. Because any
number of analysts might have expected Perry to say what he said, but the cheer
was a surprise — a welcome sort for some, but unwelcome for others.

This is the digital age, so let’s begin with an immediate outburst from
Andrew Sullivan, who during his live blogging of the debate, wrote:

9.48 pm. A spontaneous round of applause for executing people! And Perry
shows no remorse, not even a tiny smidgen of reflection, especially when we know
for certain that he signed the death warrant for an innocent man. Here’s why I
find it impossible to be a Republican: any crowd that instantly cheers the
execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join. This is the
crowd that believes in torture and executions. Can you imagine the torture that
Perry would authorize? Thank God he’s doing so poorly tonight.

The next morning, Sullivan’s former colleague, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi
Coates, seemed somewhat less rattled, though hardly
cheerier. “Apparently people were shocked by the applause here,” he wrote.
“The only thing that shocked me was that they didn’t form a rumba line. It’s a
Republican debate. And it’s America.” He continued:

Perry’s right — most people support the death penalty. It’s the job of those
of us who oppose the death penalty to change that.

It’s worth remembering that no Democratic nominee for the presidency in some
twenty years, has been against the death penalty. This is still the country
where we took kids to see men lynched, and then posed for photos.

We are a lot of things. This is one of them.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon found it unwelcome, too. Actually he found it “creepy
and disgusting.” (Greenwald, like Perry, is direct.). In a link-laden
broadside, he wrote:

[I]t’s hardly surprising for a country which long considered public hangings
a form of entertainment and in which support for the death penalty is mandated
orthodoxy for national politicians in both parties.  Still, even for those who
believe in the death penalty, it should be a very somber and sober affair for
the state, with regimented premeditation, to end the life of a human being no
matter the crimes committed.  Wildly cheering the execution of human beings as
though one’s favorite football team just scored a touchdown is primitive,
twisted and base.

All of that would be true even if the death penalty were perfectly applied
and only clearly guilty people were killed.  But in the U.S., the exact opposite
is true; see here to read about (and act to stop) a horrific though typical
example of a very likely innocent person about to be executed by the State
of Georgia.  That Perry in particular likely enabled the execution of an innocent man — as well as
numerous other highly disturbing killings, of the young and
mentally infirm — makes the cheering all the more repellent.  That the death
penalty in America has long been plagued by a serious racial bias makes it worse
still.  That this death-cheering comes from a party that relentlessly touts
itself as ”pro-life” and derides the other as The Party of Death — and loves to
condemn Islam (in contrast to its war-loving self) as a death-glorifying cult — only adds a layer of dark
irony.

That whole “perfectly applied” thing — the goal of which requires the person
being put to death to actually be guilty — also troubled others. Marie Diamond
at Think Progress Justice undertakes
a thorough debunking of the idea that everyone executed in Texas in the past
decade or so was guilty:

[D]uring Perry’s tenure as governor, DNA evidence has exonerated at least
41 people convicted in Texas, Scott Horton writes in Harper’s. According to
the Innocence
Project, “more people have been freed through DNA testing in Texas than in
any other state in the country, and these exonerations have revealed deep flaws
in the state’s criminal justice system.” Some 85
percent of wrongful convictions in Texas, or 35
of the 41 cases, are due to mistaken eyewitness identifications.

Those exonerations include Cornelius Dupree, who had already spent 30 years in
prison for rape, robbery, and abduction when DNA evidence proved
unequivocally that he was not the man who had committed those crime. Tim
Cole, the brother of Texas Sen. Rodney Ellis (D), was posthumously pardoned
a decade after he died in prison when DNA evidence proved his innocence. The
total failure of the Texas courts to protect these innocent individuals reveal a
system plagued by racial injustices, procedural flaws, and
a clemency review process that’s nothing but a rubber stamp on executions.

Leading the country in wrongful convictions probably should give Perry a
moment’s pause about the reliability of a criminal justice process he described
last night as “thoughtful.” …

And he may well have already executed an innocent man. The case of Cameron
Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the arson deaths of his three
daughters and maintained his innocence until his dying day, will likely continue to haunt
Perry throughout the campaign. Several scientists and forensics experts have
questioned the evidence that led to Willingham’s conviction, but Perry “squashed”
an official probe into his execution.

(Here is an interactive graphic of executions under Governor Perry, from the Texas Tribune.)

Taking another tack, political animal Steve Benen at Washington Monthly notes
the apparent inconsistency in Perry’s much-discussed attitude towards
science:

[W]e’re learning quite a bit about how Rick Perry thinks. Scientists tell
him, after rigorous, peer-reviewed, international research that global warming
is real, and Perry responds, “I don’t care.” A deeply flawed judicial process
puts potentially-innocent Americans on death row, and Perry responds, “Let’s get
the killin’ started.”

The governor balks when presented with evidence on evolution, abstinence
education, and climate change, but embraces without question the notion that
everyone he’s killed in Texas was 100 percent guilty. The scientific process, he
apparently believes, is unreliable, while the state criminal justice system is
infallible.

Intellectually, morally, and politically, this isn’t just wrong; it’s scary.
The fact that Republicans in the audience found this worthy of hearty applause
points to a party that’s bankrupt in more ways than one.

Of course, as Coates pointed out, this is America, and thus Perry’s stance
was praised by some as proof (not scientific) that the governor was truly
sympatico with the average American death penalty supporter.

An interesting opinion of this sort was aired by James Taranto at The Wall
Street Journal. Taranto reaches way back to the year 2000 to a New Republic
piece by Josh Marshall, which explained every other civilized country’s ban on
the death penalty as political “elitism” — the populous in most countries
support the death penalty, but their politicians forbid it. In other words, the
political systems in these other countries are “morally superior” but “less
democratic,” Marshall wrote. “[I]n Europe and Canada elites have exercised a
kind of noblesse oblige. They’ve chosen a more civilized and humane political
order over a fully popular and participatory one. It’s a perfectly defensible
position — but it might not go over that well on ‘Crossfire.’ ”

(“Crossfire” was cancelled in 2005, but you get the picture, right?)

Eleven years on, Taranto elaborates, explaining the audience applause as rooted in a sort of patriotism:

It seems to us that the crowd’s enthusiasm last night was less sanguinary
than defiant. The applause and the responses to it reflect a generations-old
mutual contempt between the liberal elite and the large majority of the
population, which supports the death penalty.

There are, of course, reasonable arguments against the death penalty. But
opponents are too resentful at their inability to steamroll over public opinion
as if this were Europe or Canada to argue their case effectively. One of their
most ludicrous tropes is to liken the U.S. to authoritarian regimes that also
practice capital punishment. In reality, as Marshall showed, America still has
the death penalty because it is less authoritarian than Europe. Thus whenever
someone makes that argument, we feel a tinge of patriotic pride. We believe a
similar sentiment lay behind last night’s applause.

(Weirdly, the caption beneath the photo of Perry read simply, “Rick Perry has
executive experience.” Italics mine.)

Another oddity of this dust-up was the digital shrapnel that hit Brian
Williams for asking the obvious question. Matthew Sheffield at Newsbusters.org
(devoted, in the site’s own words, to “exposure of liberal media bias,
insightful analysis, constructive criticism and timely corrections to news media
reporting.”) argued that Williams showed a lot of liberal elitist gall for
even going there:

As someone who makes his living by trying to appeal, at least in some
fashion, to the emotions of crowds, Williams’s inability to understand the
audience’s spontaneous outbreak of applause response to his declaration that
Texas “has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in
modern times” is a classic case of a liberal elitist being unable to compute
that his smugly held opinions are not shared by others. It was the media analog
of 1988 Democratic presidential nominee’s Michael Dukakis’s anodyne response
when asked in a debate about whether he would want a hypothetical murderer of
his wife executed.

But perhaps I’m selling Williams’s perspicacity short. One suspects he would
likely have understood a similar audience reaction were it to applaud
enthusiastically a Democratic candidate’s firm support for abortion
legalization. Such a response could equally be perceived as grisly but it seems
unlikely that Williams would entertain such a thought.

Ann Althouse also accused Williams of baiting,
not unlike a certain CNN anchor at a 1988 Democratic presidential debate:

Williams —skillfully — lures Perry into the realm of emotion. Perhaps he’s
looking for a big moment, perhaps something like what happened to Michael
Dukakis in the second presidential debate in 1988. Dukakis was against the death
penalty, and the question asked by Bernard Shaw invited him to show some passion
and fire about crime — what if your wife were raped and murdered? — and Dukakis
stayed doggedly on his track, expressing coolly rational rejection of the death
penalty.

In last night’s debate, Perry declined the invitation to show passion about
death — the death of the convicted murderer — and, like Dukakis, he stayed
coolly rational. In Sullivan’s words, he “shows no remorse” or “reflection” —
but he did show reflection, reflection about the soundness of the system of
justice. He didn’t show remorse. Remorse is what you ask a criminal to show. It
was fine for Perry not to be lured into displaying angst over executions. But
then I thought it was fine for Dukakis to keep from getting sidetracked by
Shaw’s melodramatic hypothetical. All we’re talking about is the public’s
response to the candidate and the journalist’s effort to create excitement. The
difference is, most Americans support the death penalty, and they don’t need
elaborate expressions about the deep significance of death when it’s the death
of a convicted murderer.

Certainly, as Sept. 11 approaches, the idea of revenge is in the air, as are
questions about it. Is vengeance the way of nations? Was it worth it? What is
the difference between revenge and justice? Does violence merely beget violence?
Greenwald, in the same post cited above makes the connection to the American
cheering that followed the killing of Osama bin Laden. (“In all cases,
performing giddy dances over state-produced corpses is odious and wrong.”)

Greenwald also cites Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News, who believes
he saw the national sentiment that Perry tapped into. Bunch calls the death
penalty cheer “a shocking new low” in American politics. On Thursday he wrote:
“[W]ith the 10th anniversary of 9/11 just four days away, everyone’s been
looking for a window into America’s post-attack psyche. I think that, sadly,
that window just opened wide in Simi Valley last night. I’ve never forgiven my
own newspaper, the Daily News, for leading the Sept. 12, 2001, paper with an
editorial headlined ‘Blood for blood’ that started out: ‘Revenge. Hold that
thought.’ Obviously, we have — for coming up on a decade. The cheering of
executions is the hallmark of a sick society one that’s incapable of tackling
its real demons and looking for vengeance on whomever happens to be
available.”

Given the tension in the air, and the 2012 election hovering, it’s not likely
that the warring parties will come together on this or any other issue. But who
knows? Maybe we’ll all wake up one morning and see the world differently. It’s
happened