The attorneys general of more than a dozen states urged the U.S. Justice Department to open a federal criminal civil-rights probe into the shooting death of a Black Lives Matter protester whose killer was pardoned two weeks ago by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Reuters reports. On May 16, Abbott granted a full pardon to Daniel Perry, a former U.S. Army sergeant and Uber driver who was convicted last year of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison for fatally shooting Garrett Foster, 28, a U.S. Air Force veteran, in July 2020. When he was killed, Foster was participating in a Black Lives Matter rally in Austin while legally carrying an AK-47 rifle when Perry, armed with a pistol, opened fire on Foster, an act that Perry, then 37, claimed as self-defense. Foster was white, as is Perry.
At trial, jurors ultimately were not convinced of Perry's self-defense claims. But in his pardon proclamation, Abbott said the jury's guilty verdict in effect nullified the state's "stand your ground" self-defense law, which removes a person's duty to retreat from an unprovoked threat of violence before resorting to deadly force if that person has a right to be in that place. In the letter sent to the DOJ, the attorneys generals, all of them Democrats, challenged the propriety of the Texas "stand your ground" law cited by Abbott, a Republican, as the basis for his act of clemency. Such statutes "encourage vigilantes to attend protests armed and ready to shoot and kill," said the letter, which was signed by the attorneys general of Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Vermont, as well as Washington, D.C.
ความคิดเห็น