Before we get to the substance of what happened on Thursday, when Governor Greg Abbott pardoned Daniel Perry for murder, it’s important to be specific and clear about what happened to Perry on the night of July 25, 2020. The state leaders celebrating the pardon—most prominently Attorney General Ken Paxton—are effectively telling us the specifics of the case are not important. When someone in power tells us that, it’s a good idea to look more closely.
In the summer of 2020, protests against police violence erupted across the United States. Most of these protests were peaceful, and some, like the one I witnessed in Vidor, a former “sundown town,” were downright wholesome. Others, though, turned violent, and rioters destroyed property in cities such as Minneapolis and Los Angeles. For many, it seemed a moment when long-sought reforms were possible; for others, it was a time of fear.
Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old white man and Air Force veteran from a conservative family, who was sympathetic to the protests, carried an AK-47-style rifle to a rally in downtown Austin, as is legal in Texas, with the stated goal of protecting other marchers, including his longtime girlfriend. Daniel Perry, a 30-year-old white man and Army sergeant who was driving for Uber that night, ran a red light and drove his car into a crowd. He was also legally carrying a gun. Foster, sensing a potential threat, approached Perry’s car. Perry, seeing a man with a rifle, also sensed a potential threat.
At this point, both men were fully in compliance with Texas gun laws, which makes those laws seem pretty silly in retrospect. When you have this many armed men running around, what do you expect is going to happen? His defenders claim that Perry fired because Foster pointed his rifle at Perry. He did not, as Perry made clear in his initial interview with police. He told officers that he was the first to point his gun. To police, Perry said, “I believe he was going to aim [his rifle] at me.I didn’t want to give him a chance.” He was not, in other words, claiming the right to self-defense. He was claiming the right to preemptively kill someone he thought might become a threat.
No witness testified that Foster raised his weapon. A jury of Perry’s peers determined he had not acted in self-defense, and he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for murder in 2023. A day later, Abbott vowed that he would pardon Perry pending a recommendation to do so by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose seven members Abbott appointed. At the time, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who killed two at a protest in Wisconsin and was cleared of murder charges after arguing self-defense, was becoming a right-wing celebrity. For Abbott, who is ever trying to bolster his credentials on the right, vowing to pardon Perry was a no-brainer—particularly after TV host Tucker Carlson taunted him for not doing so.
A few days later, the court released records showing that Perry used racist language, compared protesters to “monkeys” in a “zoo,” and had fantasized for weeks about shooting a protester at a Black Lives Matter rally. “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work,” he wrote once. Another time: “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” He flirted online with teenagers. He reminisced about the time he shot “an Afghan in the chest with a 50 cal,” adding that “they are not real people.”His other messages reveal a man who was angry, alienated, and conspiratorial. (He wrote that he believed the Black Lives Matter movement wanted his parents to lose their “4 bed room house” by giving it to a poor Black family.) His job as an Uber driver makes it hard not to draw the comparison with Travis Bickle, the character played by Robert De Niro in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver.
Given all the ugliness Perry spewed before committing murder, one might think Abbott would have second thoughts about offering clemency. The governor had until then been extremely reluctant to use his pardon power. While his predecessor, Rick Perry, often offered clemency to dozens of Texans a year, Abbott has been less lenient—granting just two pardons in 2022 and three in 2023—and typically only for nonviolent crimes such as writing hot checks and for convictions more than a decade old. I repeatedly asked Abbott’s aides in 2023 if the awful evidence of Perry’s racist views and homicidal intentions had changed his mind. I received no reply, which seemed like an answer of sorts. Criminal lawyers I interviewed thought the board would decline to recommend a pardon, saving Abbott the trouble.
Instead, on Thursday the agency recommended a full pardon. Abbott granted it less than an hour later, issuing a full restoration of Perry’s rights—which means that not only is Perry free, he gets his guns back. He can join Rittenhouse on the road as a hero to those who will have him. Abbott, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, did not offer a particularly compelling rationale for granting clemency. In a statement, he did not litigate the details of the case or advance a legal theory. He said simply that “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”
The DA who brought the charges, Travis County’s José Garza, did not render the verdict, of course. Perry had his day in court and lost. Abbott clearly believes, unlike the jury, that Perry had the right to self-defense just because he was fearful upon seeing a man with a rifle in public. But what does the governor think of the rights of Foster, the murder victim? Does self-defense belong only to the man who shoots first? If Foster had gunned down Perry, and he had become a cause célèbre on the left, would Abbott have pardoned him?
That’s doubtful, for the reason Attorney General Ken Paxton laid out in his statement about the case. Paxton ranks as the top law enforcement official in Texas. Most AGs would be a little circ*mspect about commenting on a high-profile criminal case like this. But not our Ken. Abbott’s pardon was important to deliver, Paxton said, as a kind of psychological balm. Americans had been “praying for justice after BLM riots terrorized the nation in 2020.” You could say that was a non sequitur. What do the protests have to do with Perry’s claim to self-defense? But the two are not unrelated; the link between them goes to the heart of the matter.
The protests in 2020 didn’t terrorize “the nation,” but they did terrify a significant portion of it. And some of those folks wanted to see blood spilled. Rittenhouse and Perry satisfied a carnal need. What terrified many was not just the sight of Black protesters on the streets and occasional scenes of buildings in flames, but also the possibility that the country was actually engaged in the reckoning over racial justice that protesters on the left—and all Americans horrified by irruptions of police violence—thought was possible. Some portion of the right cried out for the utopians to be disciplined. Perry provided a measure of that discipline.
Abbott rewarded him for it, just as he rewarded Austin police officer Justin Berry. When Berry was indicted in 2022 on charges he had used excessive force on protestors at a BLM rally in 2020, Abbott responded by endorsing his bid for the state House and then, when he lost, appointing him to the state commission that sets standards for law enforcement. (The charges against Berry were later dropped by Garza, who requested the Department of Justice investigate the police department’s practices at large.)
You see this desire for punishment again and again across the decades. When the idealist students at Kent State, peacefully protesting the Vietnam War, were disciplined by a unit of the Ohio National Guard, which killed four and wounded nine protestors in 1970, many Americans cheered. The Houston Post wrote in an editorial that the shooting of students was possibly the result of “permissiveness in child-rearing,” which had led the young to think they could challenge the old order. “At the very least,” the paper wrote, “it would appear that they have not yet learned the necessity of submitting to discipline.”
In September 2020, a friend wrote a column for Foreign Policy putting the events of the preceding summer in the context of an ugly period of Italy’s recent history: the so-called Years of Lead, the heightened political violence in Italy from the 1960s to the 1980s. In those decades, left-wing groups challenged the established order, some peacefully and some violently. To quell them, the government drew from the Mussolini playbook and allowed independent criminals, gangs, and secret societies to break knees, rather than deploying men in uniform.
Some political scientists describe this strategy as “state crime,” violence tacitly permitted or encouraged by the government. It can be helpful to a state to push back members of certain communities and signal that their lives are not deserving of protection.Some examples of state crime we’ve seen recently include the crackdown at UCLA, when police stood by while counterprotesters beat and assaulted anti-war protestors, and the January 6 riot, when the president encouraged a mob to march to the U.S. Capitol.
Texas is not a military dictatorship, and Abbott did not send Perry to attack Black Lives Matter protesters. We are not yet in the Years of Lead. But the unjustified pardon of Perry is a form of state crime, and it’s ugly. What’s next? The news of the pardon came soon after Abbott deployed state police, heavily armed, to crack down on another peaceful protest movement that is unpopular among his supporters: the rally at the University of Texas in Austin against Israel’s conduct during its war against Hamas in Gaza. What strange forces are waiting in the wings that have taken the wrong lesson from what Abbott did this week? What will Abbott do—or fail to do—when they act?
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