When a member of the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally rammed his car into a crowd of people, killing one young woman, the man was charged with murder and a slate of other crimes and marched off to prison. When an active-duty Army sergeant working as a ride-share driver, opened fire into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 and a jury sent him to jail, the Texas governor came rushing to his side.
Gov. Greg Abbott now claims that the state's "Stand Your Ground" law protected Perry because people surrounded his car. Perry, who was a whopping 70 miles from his base, actually turned his car into the crowd of people, forcing them to surround his car because he was pushing through them with the car.
Perry was convicted by a jury of his peers and hasn't even appealed his case yet, but Abbott is attacking a "progressive prosecutor" for the case and announced he'd step in.
"He encounters these protesters, and rather than turn around and leave, he drives his car into the middle of them, and you can't forget Charlottesville, where people were killed by a car doing the exact same thing," said former federal prosecutor Michael Zeldin. "So as he's approached by the victim, instead of again leaving the scene as he could have, he opens fire on him. The jury deliberates 17 hours, Jim over an eight-day trial, and they convict him of murder."
Perry used the "right to defend himself" as the defense, and the jury rejected it. Instead of supporting the judicial system, Abbott wants to go a different route, which Zeldin called nothing more than politics.
"The judge and Gov. Abbott should let the jury's verdict stand," Zeldin explained. "There's no basis in law or fact for this. So, it, therefore, smacks of politics because this was a Black Lives Matter protester and you can't ignore that context."
See his full comments with Jim Acosta below or at the link here.
Ex-prosecutor blames 'politics' and hating Black Lives Matter as excuse for Abbott killer cop pardonyoutu.be
