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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Why did Republicans cheer the executioner of this innocent man?

By David McElroy · September 10, 2011

A politician who goes out of his way to ignore the innocence of a man he’s about to execute gets nothing but contempt from me. The bloodthirsty supporters of the politician who cheer the idea that he’s an executioner — pointedly ignoring evidence that an innocent man was executed — deserve the same contempt. Meet Rick Perry and his supporters.

Todd Willingham was a troubled man from a troubled background in Texas. He drank too much. He had been known to hit his wife. He had a string of minor run-ins with the law. But when his house burned, he lost the only things that he had seemed to care about — his three children.

Fire investigators concluded that the fire must have been arson, based on guesses and assumptions. Willingham didn’t have any insurance, so there was no financial motive. Still, he was charged with murdering his three children.

At trial, prosecutors claimed he killed his kids simply because they were getting int he way of his drinking and partying, but there was no evidence of that. The only credible evidence against him was that two fire investigators said the fire was arson.

Willingham was offered a plea bargain. If he would plead guilty, he would be spared the death penalty and get life in prison without parole. He refused, saying that he couldn’t say he killed his children. He never once wavered in that.

The only other piece of evidence against Willingham was from a bi-polar man in prison. The guy had never known Willingham, but he claimed that Willingham randomly confessed the killings over an intercom system one day while he was walking down a prison hall — an intercom that prison guards would have heard. (The man later recanted his testimony and then recanted the recantation. He’s clearly a disturbed mentally disturbed man.)

After Willingham’s appeals had run out, an actual fire expert — an academic with lab training and long experience with experiments — agreed to review Willingham’s case. It was just a few weeks before Willingham’s scheduled execution, but he was quickly able to see the mistakes the original fire investigators had made. They had testified that certain things made the fire arson, but he was aware of actual experiments that proved the evidence they were citing didn’t mean what they believed it meant. They were merely repeating old stories that had been passed down among firefighters — things which turned out to have zero basis in fact.

There was no arson, so there was no murder. This evidence was sent to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has the power to grant a delay in the execution or even to pardon a convicted person. The evidence suggests that Perry’s office refused to even look at the evidence. As a result, Texas executed a man for a crime that clearly never took place.

In 2009, the Texas Forensic Science Commission was scheduled to hear testimony about the Willingham case — testimony that would prove that the state had executed an innocent man. Rick Perry abruptly replaced three members of the commission with men who suddenly canceled the hearing. Perry and his supporters didn’t want anyone to learn that he had watched an innocent man die — when he had the power to stop the state-sanctioned murder.

I’ve done prison ministry work in the past, and I believe that most of the people in prisons are guilty of something. Most of them are lousy human beings. But I’ve also seen enough evidence that the criminal justice system is badly flawed to know that almost anyone can get caught in a web of incompetent government employees, ambitious prosecutors, bloodthirsty juries who trust police, and politicians who are scared to do anything that doesn’t look “tough on crime.” In such a system, nobody really cares about the truth — just as long as proper procedures are followed.

The very clear truth of this case is that Rick Perry looked the other way while an innocent man was being executed, and then he took clear steps to cover up the fact that the state had been wrong. The man has blood on his hands — and he’s unwilling to admit that the system was wrong. And his bloodthirsty (and just plain ignorant) supporters cheer that fact.

It was The New Yorker that brought this story to the public consciousness in a big way two years ago. I highly recommend that you read David Grann’s excellent story about it. It’s good reporting and good writing, but it’s a sickening truth.

On Friday, one past resident of Texas’ death row had his own thoughts about Perry’s statements about Texas executions (and of the crowds’ cheers at the numbers of executions). Anthony Graves was one of the rare few who finally finds complete exoneration after years on death row. He spent 18 years in prison — and 12 of those years on death row — before being exonerated last year.

At Wednesday’s debate Perry told the audience, “I think Americans understand justice.” Graves disagrees.

“He should ask my mother about that,” Graves told ABC News Thursday. “She lost her son for 18 years.”

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Briefly

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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