Le gouverneur du Texas Rick Perry, candidat républicain pour l'investiture de son parti, est à la tête d'un état qui exécute chaque année un grand nombre de détenu. On pourrait croire que certaines statistiques pousseraient les américains à s'interroger sur la question. Il semble que non... La peine capitale n'est pas un enjeu de la course de Perry.
"But in a measure of how much the electorate’s passions have shifted, Perry’s death penalty record isn’t looking like it will have much of an effect on his White House ambitions — as a positive or a negative. That’s a big change from the days when Bernard Shaw pressed Michael Dukakis at a 1988 debate about whether he’d still oppose the death penalty for someone who’d raped and murdered his wife, or when Bill Clinton took time off the trail in 1992 to attend the execution of a brain-damaged cop killer.
“The public is a lot more ambivalent than they had been, say 15 years ago,” said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment. “They see it as a grayer issue now.”
A recent Gallup Poll showed the majority of Americans — 64 percent — support the death penalty for convicted murderers, but the issue has fallen from the forefront of the electorate’s interests.
That’s made the death penalty a “secondary issue,” Dieter said. “It may be a character issue. It may be an issue that people do have an opinion on, but I don’t think that it’s an issue that they vote on.”
People on both sides of the issue agree.
“The death penalty is not, at least so far, a public policy issue that people are animated about in terms of this election cycle,” said Cully Stimson, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Most of the upcoming Texas executions are as uncontroversial as capital punishment gets — a man who murdered his wife in front of their 5-year-old daughter and killed a San Antonio police officer, for example. But they’re scheduled to intersect with some of the highest-profile days of the fall campaign for Perry, who’s still introducing himself to the electorate. Just one day after the debate sponsored by CNN and the Tea Party Express on Sept. 12, Texas is set to execute 31-year-old Steven Woods, convicted of robbing and killing a man in Denton County in May 2001. Two men, 47-year-old Cleve Foster and 44-year-old Lawrence Brewer, are set to be executed in the days immediately preceding the Orlando debate hosted by Fox News and the Republican Party of Florida and the state party’s Presidency 5 straw poll Sept. 24.
The issue doesn’t seem as if it will play a significant role during the primary campaign, and if it does, it’s likely to be to Perry’s advantage: Though all the Republican candidates favor the death penalty, none of them have a record on it. Perry’s support for capital punishment will be yet another element of his executive experience to stress and another way of appealing to the base over Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman — neither oversaw executions during his time in office, since Massachusetts has no death penalty and Utah didn’t exercise the one on its books during Huntsman’s tenure."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/62209.html
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