Floyd should get a posthumous pardon
Abbott has the chance to right the wrong of a questionable 2004 drug arrest.
In 2014, in the midst of a fierce campaign for governor, Attorney General Greg Abbott spoke in Lubbock alongside his opponent, Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis, as Gov. Rick Perry unveiled a 13-foot-tall statue in honor of Timothy Cole, the only Texan to receive a posthumous pardon to date. Cole, an Army veteran and Texas Tech student who was Black, was wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in 1986. Cole died behind bars in 1999 without hearing that another man had confessed to the crime.
“Tim Cole’s statue will forever be a reminder that we must always pursue justice, no matter how long it takes,” Abbott said then.
Abbott previously had issued an opinion supporting the governor’s authority to issue it posthumously. Seven years later, Abbott should remember his words about Cole’s case and issue his own pardon, albeit in a much different case, this one involving former Houston resident George Floyd.
Long before the murder of Floyd, who was Black, by a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, before becoming a rallying cry for police reform throughout America, Floyd was arrested in Third Ward in 2004 for possessing crack cocaine.
The officer who arrested him? The notoriously corrupt Gerald Goines, who was fired for misconduct after an investigation following the disastrous 2019 raid on Harding Street found a pattern of false testimony and other lies. He has since been indicted on two counts of felony murder and charges have been dropped in more than 100 cases involving his police work.
That record of deceit — or, as a court put it, Goines’ “propensity to be untruthful in his undercover drug assignments” — led Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg in April to support calls for Abbott to issue a pardon of Floyd.
Remarkably, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles agreed. It unanimously voted two months ago to take the rare step of recommending a pardon. That put the matter squarely in Abbott’s hands.
And that’s where it has stayed. After issuing an early statement saying he’d consider the recommendation, he has remained mum.
Allison Mathis, the Houstonbased public defender who brought the request to the parole board, said this week that repeated calls and emails to Abbott’s office have elicited no response. “I just don’t want it to die on his desk,” she told the Texas Tribune. “Up or down, one way or another, just give us an answer,” Mathis said. We agree.
Requests for comment by the editorial board have also received no response.
If Abbott is struggling with this decision, we can’t imagine why. No, there’s no iron-clad DNA evidence to clear Floyd as there was in Cole’s case but Floyd’s drug case is nothing akin to a violent rape. The pardon’s risk to public safety is zero, as Floyd is dead. What we know for sure is that his arresting officers had a track record of lying, and that many cases similar to Floyd’s have already been tossed out.
Some may wonder: why bother with a posthumous pardon? Clearing his record of doubtful drug charges now won’t bring him back, nor ease the injustice of his murder by Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who was fired and subsequently convicted of murder.
But justice is justice.
"A man was set up by a corrupt police officer intent on securing arrests rather than pursuing justice,” Mathis said in October. “No matter what your political affiliation is, no matter who that man was in his life or in his death, that is not something we should stand for in the United States or in Texas.”
Abbott should heed the calls of Floyd’s family and the governor’s own appointees on the pardons board.
Pardoning Floyd would show the world that the governor of Texas acknowledges police misconduct happens everywhere and remind us all that the work of police reform spurred by Floyd’s murder is not yet done.
And what does Abbott’s inaction say? It suggests the governor is letting politics trump justice. Abbott faces two challengers from the right in the 2022 GOP primary and a likely competitive race against a wellfunded Democrat in former congressman Beto O’Rourke in the fall. Maybe’s he’s afraid a pardon will make him look soft on crime.
There’s nothing weak about acknowledging injustices in the system and trying to repair them. True weakness is letting them fester to ensnare more people.
Abbott, were those just grandstanding words at Cole’s memorial in 2014, or did you really mean them? You have the power to show us. Grant Floyd’s pardon, and soon. Give his family, and Texans across the state, some small measure of comfort that you believe justice, even if it’s unpopular with some partisans, is still worth pursuing.