Houston Chronicle
How cowardly can Gov. Greg Abbott get?
He showed us on Thursday. The state parole board finally rejected a posthumous pardon for George Floyd’s questionable 2004 drug conviction after months of uncertainty that wreaked of politics.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, not known to be a warm, fuzzy, compassionate entity, raised eyebrows in 2021 when it recommended that Abbott grant the posthumous pardon for Floyd, and then raised suspicions by abruptly rescinding it.
How did we get here? The board’s vote to pardon Floyd had been unanimous. All that was left was Abbott’s approval, which he said he’d consider, before he suddenly went silent as the matter stalled. When the board took back its recommendation two months later, there was little explanation other than a procedural error that affected Floyd’s and 24 other requests.
Regardless, the decision had the desired consequence: Abbott, who is up for re-election and vying to be considered as a 2024 presidential contender, no longer had to make the tough choice between partisanship or justice.
“As a result of the Board’s withdrawal of the recommendation concerning George Floyd, Governor Abbott did not have the opportunity to consider it,” his press secretary said in a statement at the time.
How convenient. But really, what was there to consider?
His lawyer said the request “had already been through a compliance review,” according to the Texas Tribune, and that none of the parole board members had raised any issues.
The facts were simple enough.
The Houston cop who arrested Floyd for possession of what wasn’t even half a gram of crack cocaine turned out to be one of the most corrupt cops in recent Houston history. Years after Floyd’s arrest, the cop, Gerald Goines was fired following the disastrous and deadly Harding Street raid, which was conducted after officers obtained a noknock warrant under false premises. In addition to other charges, Goines was indicted for two counts of felony murder.
The court noted his “propensity to be untruthful in his undercover drug assignments.” More than 100 cases were thrown out because of his involvement.
When Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, it was hardly the first injustice he had experienced. A pardon, even a posthumous one, offered a chance to set the record straight given the significant doubt around Goines’ police work.
“A man was set up by a corrupt police officer intent on securing arrests rather than pursuing justice,” Floyd’s lawyer, Allison Mathis, said last year. “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.”
It seems some political affiliations do preclude the pursuit of justice in certain situations. Justice for all only goes so far in Texas these days.
In 2020, Abbott attended the viewing at the Fountain of Praise Church where he bowed his head before Floyd’s open, gleaming golden casket lined with blue velvet. “George Floyd is going to change the arc of the future of the United States. George Floyd has not died in vain. His life will be a living legacy about the way that America and Texas responds to this tragedy,” Abbott told reporters outside.
For a man whose life ended in such unjust tragedy, the state’s unwillingness now to correct an even smaller injustice and to ensure that his legacy is rightfully remembered is petty and mean.
Floyd’s pardon has nothing to do with contentious police reform bills or political accusations of “defunding” law enforcement. It’s completely possible to “back the blue” while also backing justice and the fair reassessment of cases where bad cops tainted outcomes.
“This was a chance for Texas to do a small, good thing: to take an apolitical stance that no matter who a person is, their rights need to be respected and an accurate record of their life is important,” Mathis said in a statement to the Tribune following this week’s rejection from the parole board. She’ll be allowed to reapply in two years.
“(I)t is unclear to me what happened to completely reverse their decision,” Mathis said in her statement to the Tribune. We find ourselves similarly confused.
Is the governor so scared of upsetting his base that he cannot acknowledge that Floyd’s conviction is tied to some of the worst police work imaginable?
We won’t know because the board has conveniently taken the decision out of his hands. In the end, the gesture of a posthumous pardon is small. But not nearly as small as the man who denied it to someone as deserving as Floyd.
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