The board’s pardon recommendation came as a shock to many familiar with the Perry case. All seven members of the board, appointed by Abbott, were respected by pardons lawyers in the state. “We entered this process believing that the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles were people of integrity who would put the law above politics,” Garza told Texas Monthly. “We were wrong.”

Almost from the start, Perry’s case proceeded through the board in an unusual manner. A day after the guilty verdict, in April 2023, Abbott publicly called for Perry’s clemency and announced that he had instructed the board to expedite the review process, even though Texas law states that a full pardon will not be considered for anyone currently in prison except under “exceptional circumstances.” (Unlike full pardons, commutations can be considered without “exceptional circumstances” for those serving prison sentences.) Typically, exceptions apply to cases in which new evidence of innocence is presented. Here, however, what appears to have been exceptional was the pressure from Abbott. Although the governor has the legal authority to request a pardon, Abbott had never done so in his then eight-plus years in office. “The board hasn’t voiced or identified any [exceptional circumstances], so the only thing that comes to mind is the special intrusion of a craven politician in the pardon process,” said Gary Cohen, a parole attorney who has been practicing for more than thirty years and who has consulted with the board on its parole system.

Less than a week after Abbott’s promise, Texas district court judge Cliff Brown, who presided over the trial, released a trove of social media posts and texts written by Perry ahead of his sentencing. These documents revealed racist comments and fantasies of killing Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as messages to apparent minors. “No nudes until you are old enough to be of age,” Perry wrote to a girl who claimed to be sixteen years old. “I am going to bed come up with a reason why I should be your boyfriend before I wake up.”

Many legal experts speculated that the board would drag its feet and provide political cover for Abbott. The governor could claim to his right-wing supporters that he’d tried to pardon Perry, without actually having to do so. Garza, however, wanted assurances. He called Bettie Wells, general counsel for the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Normally, when the board reviews cases, input from the involved parties is given through written statements, not in-person meetings. But given the political nature of the pardon, Garza wanted a face-to-face conference. He says Wells told him on the call not to worry about showing up yet. The review of Perry’s pardon was going to take a while, she said, which Garza took as a sign that the board wasn’t making the case a priority, despite Abbott’s public pronouncement that he was “working [on it] as swiftly as Texas law allows.”

Wells and David Gutiérrez, the chairman of the pardons board, declined requests for interviews but responded with a statement. “Pursuant to Governor Abbott’s request, the Board of Pardons and Paroles conducted a thirteen-month investigation, after which, the Board recommended the Governor grant a full pardon,” they wrote. “By statute, the information obtained and maintained concerning the investigation is privileged and confidential.”

When Garza checked back in on the case in late January 2024, he learned on a phone call with Wells that the board had met with Perry’s defense counsel. It had also heard testimony from Detective David Fugitt, the lead investigator on the case, who did not arrest Perry the night of the killing because he believed the Uber driver could have acted in self-defense. Perry’s lawyers had argued in front of the board that Garza had committed witness tampering by forcing Fugitt to remove exculpatory evidence from his presentation to the grand jury, a claim that Brown, the judge, had dismissed during pretrial arguments. Also distressing to Garza was the revelation by Wells that the defense counsel had provided the board with the grand jury transcripts, presumably to dispute the grand jury’s decision to indict Perry, based on the allegation that Garza tampered with one of the witnesses. Garza told Wells he felt the transcripts should be secret and were potentially unlawful for the defendant to distribute.

On a nice, quiet street in a nice, quiet neighborhood just north of Houston lives a nice, quiet man. He is 54 years old, tall but not too tall, thin but not too thin, with short brown hair that has turned gray around the sideburns. He has soft brown eyes. He sometimes wears wire-rimmed glasses that give him a scholarly appearance.

The man lives alone with his two cats. Every morning, he pads barefoot into the kitchen to feed his cats, then he steps out the back door to feed the goldfish that live in a small pond. He takes a few minutes to tend to his garden, which is filled with caladiums and lilies, gardenias and wisteria, a Japanese plum tree, and rare green roses. Sometimes the man sits silently on a little bench by the goldfish pond, next to a small sculpture of a Balinese dancer. He breathes in and out, calming his mind. Or he goes back inside his house, where he sits in his recliner in the living room and reads. He reads Shakespeare, psychiatrist Carl Jung, and Gandhi. He even keeps a book of Gandhi’s quotations on his coffee table. One of his favorites is “Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”

He is always polite, his neighbors say. He smiles when they see him, and he says hello in a light, gentle voice. But he reveals little about himself, they say. When he is asked what he does for a living, he says only that he works in “human resources” at a company downtown. Then he smiles one more time, and he heads back inside his house.

What the neighbors don’t know is that in his bedroom, next to his four-poster bed, the man has a black telephone, on which he receives very unusual calls.

“We’ve got something for you,” a voice says when he answers. “A new client.”

“Okay,” the man says.

The voice on the other end of the line tells him that a husband is interested in ending his marriage or that a wife would like to be single again or that an entrepreneur is ready to dissolve a relationship with a partner.

The man hangs up and returns to his recliner. He thinks about what service he should offer his new client. A car bombing, perhaps. Or maybe a drive-by shooting. Or he can always bring up the old standby, the faked residential burglary.

As he sits in his recliner, his cats jump onto his lap. They purr as he strokes them behind their ears. The man sighs, then he returns to his reading. “Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed,” wrote Gandhi. “Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.”

Put simply: Key Founders believed that America’s future was to be one in which dynamic trade, entrepreneurial spiritedness and, commercial audacity would define society — not aristocratic priorities. The “republic” side of the equation was that these market freedoms would be grounded upon institutions and virtues derived from those same classical, religious, and Enlightenment sources: virtues that don’t just grease the wheels of commerce, but which, as Adam Smith wrote, are nothing less than “excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful.”

Put another way: America isn’t meant to be a facsimile of Western European social democracy. America isn’t meant to be an outpost of Central European traditionalism. America isn’t meant to regard the federal government as its economic savior. America is meant to be something unique, something exceptional.

Today’s America is far removed from the civilization of ideas upon which it is built. Its polar opposites — populism, demagoguery — stalk the land. Our fiscal house is a shambles. Our economy is riddled with regulation, welfarism, bureaucracy, and cronyism. And those who Adam Smith called “men of system” have emerged across the political spectrum to demand even more power to direct that economy from the top-down. From left to right, interventionist hubris is in, and economic humility is out.

But we should not despair. Bad ideas are powerful, but good ideas are difficult to keep down.

A new heat battery design has reached a record power conversion efficiency of 44%. This thermophotovoltaic cell is a major step on the way to sustainable grid-scale energy storage from renewable sources.

With renewable energy prices dropping fast, the barrier now is their intermittency – the first point any renewable energy skeptic will throw at you is “but what happens at night or when the wind isn’t blowing?” A little thing called “batteries” can help there, and there’s no shortage of grid-scale storage systems that can save energy for (literally) rainy days. […]

“We’re not yet at the efficiency limit of this technology,” said Stephen Forrest, contributing author of the study. “I am confident that we will get higher than 44% and be pushing 50% in the not-too-distant future.”