Abbott’s punt on posthumous pardon for Floyd hardly respectable
Ah, the holidays — the season of mean-spirited pandering and chronic cowardice from people in leadership.
Oh, wait. That’s just in Texas, which is currently led by a governor whose fear of opponents in the coming GOP primary apparently knows no bounds.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday announced he will not be issuing a posthumous pardon to George Floyd for a 17-year-old drug arrest in Houston by a now-disgraced former cop whose investigations have been called into question.
The two-term Republican also announced that he doesn’t want to be held personally responsible for that decision. Rather, the governor would prefer us to blame the Texas State Board of Pardons and Paroles, which had unanimously recommended a pardon for Floyd back in October. Board members are appointed by the governor.
According to Abbott’s office, the board rescinded this clemency recommendation, along with 24 others it had made, after belatedly discovering “procedural errors” in the applications for them. And so, in Abbott’s telling, there was literally nothing he could do; he can’t even offer an opinion on the subject.
“As a result of the board’s withdrawal of the recommendation concerning George Floyd, Governor Abbott did not have the opportunity to consider it,” said his spokesperson, Renae Eze, in a statement.
Perhaps some Texans will buy that?
“The timing speaks for itself,” said Allison Mathis of the Harris
County Public Defender’s Office, on Christmas Eve. Mathis filed the request for a pardon on behalf of Floyd’s surviving family members in April.
Other observers were less diplomatic.
“Classic Greg Abbott. He didn’t have the guts to grant George Floyd a posthumous pardon, nor the guts to reject it,” observed Julián Castro, a Democrat and the former mayor of
San Antonio. “So he got the
pardon/parole board to withdraw their recommendation. Magic!”
Floyd, 46, a former Houston resident, was killed in May 2020 when then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. The murder of Floyd, who was Black, by Chauvin, who is white, was bravely captured on video by a bystander, Darnella Frazier, who was just 17 at the time.
The video of Floyd’s agonizing final minutes — prone on a city street, telling the cops he couldn’t breathe — horrified the nation and galvanized thousands of Americans to take to the streets to protest police violence against Black Americans that had led to a troubling number of deaths. Chauvin was convicted last April of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
But Floyd’s horrifying death — and the rallies, protests and politics in its wake — actually has nothing to do with the question at hand, which is whether he should be pardoned for a 2004 arrest in Harris County that we now know to have been deeply flawed from the outset.
Floyd was charged with delivery of a controlled substance after Gerald Goines, then a Houston police officer, arrested him for allegedly dealing a small amount of crack cocaine. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 months in state prison.
The issue with this conviction is that Goines — the officer entirely responsible for it — has since been thoroughly discredited. He came under scrutiny after a botched 2019 drug raid that left a husband and wife dead, fatally shot by police. Goines was subsequently charged with murder in connection with the Harding Street raid, as well as other forms of misconduct, including lying to obtain affidavits. He has maintained his innocence.
As a result of this scandal, Goines’ previous cases have been revisited, for obvious reasons. And a number of them — including this one — don’t pass muster with law enforcement, given the new information about Goines himself.
Goines “made up the existence of a confidential informant who provided crucial evidence to underpin the arrest,” Mathis wrote in her application to the parole board. “And no one bothered to question the word of a veteran cop against that of a previously convicted Black man.”
“We do not support the integrity of Mr. Floyd’s conviction and agree these circumstances warrant a posthumous pardon,” wrote Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, a Democrat, in her own April letter to the board supporting the application.
Mathis told me Friday that the social justice movement Floyd galvanized had nothing to do with her application for a posthumous pardon. Rather, she said, Floyd was one of many Houstonians convicted as a result of Goines’ misdeeds, and —given Floyd’s death — a posthumous pardon is the only relief available, in this case.
“It’s just about correcting the record,” Mathis said.
Goines’ attorney, Nicole DeBorde Hochglaube, has denied that her client targeted Floyd or fabricated evidence, calling the accusations “political.”
“There is no new evidence whatsoever to support there was anything wrong with the arrest of Mr. Floyd,” she told the Chronicle in October.
For the governor to demur when asked to weigh in on the parole board’s recommendation is hardly respectable. It’s possible that his mind resembles some kind of lunar landscape, arid and uninhabited. But that would be an uncharitable assumption, would it not?
It’s more likely that Abbott, who faces two primary opponents who may have even more extreme conservative positions than he does, was considering Republican primary politics rather than the merits of this particular case. Abbott, a former state attorney general and Texas Supreme Coirt justice, may understand that the law supports a pardon. But perhaps he also perceives a political downside with his conservative base of pardoning a man who cycled in and out of the criminal justice system, ultimately with tragic — and galvanizing — results.
What we continue to learn about this governor is that political considerations too often trump doing the right thing.