Daniel Perry, a U.S. Army sergeant who fatally shot an armed protester at a Black Lives Matter march in Texas was sentenced to 25 years in prison after prosecutors used his social media history and text messages to portray him as a racist who may commit violence again. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has said he wants to pardon Perry swiftly, the Associated Press reports. Abbott asked the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to send him a pardon recommendation for Perry, 36, shortly after he was convicted in April of killing Garrett Foster at the Austin march in July 2020.
Abbott cited Texas’ tough Stand Your Ground self-defense laws and said Perry was railroaded by a liberal prosecutor. Since then, Perry’s trail of texts and online posts, including racist images, have been made public and the governor has stayed silent. Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said Abbott moved too soon on the call for a pardon. “Abbott clearly boxed himself into a corner,” when he appeared to respond to criticism from former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, who demanded the governor act, Jones said. The case has been embroiled in politics amid widespread demonstrations against police killings and racial injustice after the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer. Perry’s attorneys called the case a “political prosecution” and the release of the texts and social media posts “character assassination.”