A US army sergeant was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Wednesday, for fatally shooting an armed man during a Black Lives Matter protest in Texas – even after the Republican governor said he wanted to pardon the man.
Daniel Perry, 36, was convicted of murder in April for killing Garrett Foster during the downtown Austin protest in July 2020.
The conviction prompted outrage among conservatives. The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has said he will sign a pardon once he has a recommendation from the Texas pardons and parole board, which is stacked with Abbott appointees.
On the governor’s orders, the board is reviewing Perry’s case. It is unclear when it will reach a decision.
The district judge, Clifford Brown, spoke during sentencing. He did not address the potential pardon directly. But he insisted Perry had a “fair and impartial trial” and the jury’s decision “deserves our honor and it deserves to be respected”.
Perry was stationed at Fort Hood, about 70 miles north of Austin, when the shooting happened.
Perry, who is white, was working as a ride-share driver on 25 July 2020 when he shot and killed 28-year-old Foster, an air force veteran, also white.
Foster was legally carrying an AK-47 rifle as he participated in a demonstration against police killings and racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer.
Perry dropped off a ride-share customer and turned on to a street filled with protesters. He said he was trying to get past the crowd and fired his pistol when Foster pointed the rifle at him. Witnesses testified they did not see Foster raise his weapon. Prosecutors argued that Perry could have driven away without shooting.
Perry said he acted in self-defense. His lawyers asked the judge to consider his more than a decade-long military career and hand down a sentence of no more than 10 years. Perry has been classified as in “civilian confinement” and is pending separation from the military, said an army spokesman, Bryce Dubee.
The sentencing range for the murder conviction is five years to life. A prosecutor, Guillermo Gonzalez, urged Brown to issue a sentence of at least 25 years.
“This man is a loaded gun, ready to go off at any perceived threat,” Gonzalez said. “He’s going to do it again.”
On Tuesday, prosecutors submitted into evidence dozens of texts and social media posts Perry wrote, shared or liked, including some shockingly racist images.
They were excluded from Perry’s trial but publicly released after his conviction and allowed into the sentencing phase by Brown.
A month before the shooting, Perry wrote on Facebook: “It is official I am a racist because I do not agree with people acting like animals at the zoo.”
Floyd was killed on 25 May 2020. A few days later, as protests erupted across the US, Perry sent a text to an acquaintance: “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”
An attorney for Perry, Douglas O’Connell, argued the texts and posts were presented out of context, and that Perry had a right to free speech.
“Some of those social media posts are frankly repugnant,” O’Connell said, while classifying others as “dark humor”.
A forensic psychologist, Greg Hupp, testified that he believed Perry had post-traumatic stress disorder from his deployment to Afghanistan and being bullied as a child. Perry’s mother, Rachel Perry, testified that he was ostracized as a child because of a speech impediment.