By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Friday, Oct 23, 2009
http://www.salon.com/news/death_penalty/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2009/10/23/texas_justice
The
while enduring a governor who's in love with the
death penalty
On Oct. 13, we lost a resolute champion of the law, a
man who left his impact on the lives of untold numbers
of Americans.
His very name made his life's work almost inevitable, a
matter of destiny. William Wayne Justice was a federal
judge for the Eastern District of
he was "Judge Justice." And he spent a distinguished
legal career making sure that everyone -- no matter
their color or income or class -- got a fair shake. As
a former
"Judge Justice dragged
Dragged it kicking and screaming, for it was Justice
who ordered
1971 -- 17 years after the Supreme Court's Brown v.
Board of Education decision made separate schools for
blacks and whites unconstitutional.
doing the right thing for as long as it could. Many of
its segregated schools for African-American children
were so poor they still had outhouses instead of indoor plumbing.
This small-town lawyer appointed to the federal bench
by President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered
its public housing to everyone, regardless of their
skin color. He looked at the state's "truly shocking
conditions" in its juvenile detention system and said,
Repair it. He struck down state law that permitted
public schools to charge as much as a thousand dollars
tuition for the children of illegal immigrants.
And Justice demanded a top-to-bottom overhaul of
prisons, some of the most brutal and corrupt in the
nation. He even held the state in contempt of court
when he thought it was dragging its feet cleaning up a
system where thousands of inmates slept on the dirty
bare floors of their cellblocks and often went without
medical care. The late, great Molly Ivins said, "He
brought the
Some say that justice stings. William Wayne Justice
certainly did -- and his detractors stung back with
death threats and hate mail. Carpenters refused to
repair his house; beauty parlors denied service to his
wife. There were cross burnings and constant calls for his impeachment.
After he desegregated the schools he was offered armed
guards for protection. He turned them down and instead
took lessons in self-defense.
You need to understand that while so many Texans have
fought and are fighting the good fight in the Judge
Justice tradition, others believe in the law only when
it sides with them. They long for the good old days of
Judge
was known in the frontier days as "the law west of the
first, try 'em later."
The present governor of
Bean. During his nine years in office, Rick Perry --
"Gov. Goodhair," as Ivins called him -- has presided
over more than 200 executions, dwarfing the previous
record of 152 set by his predecessor in the governor's
mansion, George W. Bush. (The most, it is said, of any
Lethal injection is practically a religious ritual in
will send Khristian Oliver to die in just a couple of
weeks -- on Nov. 5, to be exact -- jurors in the east
what they were looking for in the book of Numbers,
where it reads, "The murderer shall surely be put to
death," and, "The revenger of blood himself shall slay
the murderer." Although it was noted that referencing
holy writ was an inappropriate "external influence,"
two appeals courts upheld the jury's sentence and the
Perry will do almost anything to please the vengeful
crowd in the Colosseum with their thumbs turned down.
Did we mention that next year he's up for reelection?
When it turned out recently that five years ago the
state may have executed a man for a crime he didn't
commit, Perry pulled some particularly shady moves.
In February 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was put to
death for allegedly setting a fire that killed his
three young daughters. Perry has willfully ignored
evidence from top arson investigators that the blaze
was not homicide but an accident.
Now Perry has fired the chairman and three members of
the state's Forensic Science Commission just as they
were about to hear further scientific testimony that
might prove Willingham's innocence. This week, Perry
told reporters that the controversy is "nothing more
than propaganda from the anti-death penalty people
across the country."
They can be short on mercy in
reason to mourn the loss of Justice -- William Wayne
Justice. Rest in peace, your honor.
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