Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday issued a pardon to Daniel Perry, the man who murdered a Black Lives Matter demonstrator in 2020 after repeatedly fantasizing about shooting protesters. “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney,” the Republican said in a statement after issuing the pardon and restoring Perry’s “Full Civil Rights of Citizenship,” which includes firearm ownership. “Americans across the country have been watching this case in Texas and praying for justice after BLM riots terrorized the nation in 2020,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a follow-up statement.
“[George Soros]-backed prosecutors like Jose Garza do not get to pick and choose what rights we have as Americans,” Paxton added, referring to the Travis County district attorney and to the billionaire philanthropist who is frequently invoked in anti-semitic far-right conspiracy theories. “I am relieved that justice has prevailed.” (Soros’s non-profit made a donation to a political action committee that backed Garza’s 2020 campaign.)
In any event, to call this “justice” is an outrage. Perry, who was a 30-year-old Army sergeant at the time, drove his car through a red light and into a crowd of protesters in Austin, where they were demonstrating against the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Garrett Foster, an Air Force veteran taking part in the demonstration, approached the car while legally open-carrying an AK-47. Perry shot and killed Foster, claiming the protester had raised his weapon. Foster’s gun was recovered with the safety on and no cartridge in the chamber, and eyewitnesses said Foster did not point it at Perry, who seemed to contradict his own account during his interview with police after the shooting.
“I believe he was going to aim at me,” Perry told a detective. “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.”
Perry was found guilty last April and was later sentenced to 25 years in prison. But Perry—who during 2020 BLM protests expressed a desire to “shoot looters” and suggested he may need to “kill a few people on my way to work” over social media—became a cause célèbre for conservatives, who demanded that Abbott intervene. “Don’t let a Soros-owned Austin liberal DA destroy our justice system in Texas,” MAGA Representative Ronny Jackson posted after the conviction. “You need to PARDON Daniel Perry IMMEDIATELY!”
It wasn’t Soros who found Perry guilty, though; it was a jury of 12 peers in Texas. Abbott, with this explicitly political pardon, isn’t reinforcing the justice system—he’s further undermining it. “Make no mistake: Daniel Perry is a murderer who was on a mission to commit violence against Texans,” Gilberto Hinjosa, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, said in a statement. “Our justice system was hijacked for political gain.”
Abbott quickly received plaudits from the right for pardoning Perry, an avowed “racist.” “I am proud to call you my governor,” wrote Kyle Rittenhouse, who as an Illinois 19-year-old killed two people and wounded one other during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020. (Rittenhouse, who claimed self-defense, was found not guilty on charges of homicide and reckless endangerment.) “The right to self-defense is sacred, and you showed that we are allowed to defend ourselves in the great state of Texas.”
But this “right” to self-defense seems to apply selectively in Abbott’s Texas. It apparently does not cover Foster or the other protesters Perry plowed through, and overrides Foster’s First and Second amendment rights, the latter of which is also regarded in Texas as sacrosanct. Abbott is not only sending a message that “only certain lives matter,” as Foster’s former fiancée, Whitney Mitchell, said in a statement Thursday; the governor and his supporters are giving the green light to target protesters and commit other acts of political violence in the future. “Daniel Perry texted his friends about plans to murder a protester he disagreed with,” Mitchell said. “After a lengthy trial, with an abundance of evidence, 12 impartial Texans determined that he carried out that plan and murdered the love of my life.”
“With this pardon,” Mitchell added, “the governor has desecrated the life of a murdered Texan, impugned the jury’s just verdict, and declared that citizens can be killed with impunity as long as they hold political views that are different from those in power.”
