“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 five-year-old daughter and also 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 Texas 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 in a significant way 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.
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