Thursday, August 12, 2010

What's Up With Johnny Frank Garrett?

This blog has experienced an unusually large amount of traffic lately, mostly due to people clicking on the link I placed in the Wikipedia article on Johnny Frank Garrett. The link has been there a while. The interest is more recent.

While certainly pleased by the increased traffic, I'm puzzled by the sudden interest in Johnny Frank. For a while, I assumed it was because few people could resist checking out any post that had "and Bubbles the Clairvoyant" in the title. I've since dismissed that brilliant title as the cause of the increased traffic.

It now occurs to me that people are becoming interested in Johnny Frank's case because of the hearing Judge Fine will hold regarding the constitutionality of the Texas death penalty. He is likely to declare the Texas death penalty law unconstitutional if the defense can satisfy him that Texas has already executed innocent people. I couple that with the fact that, so far, I have scored Johnny Frank Garret as more likely to be innocent than any other person I have scored. As a reminder, I present the complete list below.

Charles Anthony Boyd, 1 

By my decimal accounting, that is 8 innocent people executed by Texas. I still have a long way to go in my search for the 54, but 8 innocent people executed is already a disturbing number. But back to the mystery of the Johnny Frank Garrett traffic.

I decided that, if my Judge Fine hypothesis is correct, most of the traffic will be coming from Texas. I check and find that Texans are responsible for 11% of the page views. While that's a disproportionately large percentage from Texas, the fine folks from Illinois are responsible for a whopping 17%. That means more than a quarter of the traffic on this blog has been originating recently from either Texas or Illinois. While that is interesting, it doesn't confirm or disprove my Judge Fine hypothesis.

I then checked the traffic for the other people I have scored most likely to be factually innocent but dead at the end of a Texas needle. While there was some modest foot traffic for Robert Nelson Drew, there was none to speak of for David Wayne Spence or Carlos DeLuna.

When I couple all that with the fact that Judge Fine's hearing is still 3 months away, I conclude that my Judge Fine hypothesis is unlikely to be correct.

So, if it's not the clever title, and it's not Judge Fine's hearing, what is it that is causing the recent Johnny Frank Garrett traffic on this site. Perhaps some of those readers who have been visiting to read about Garrett will post a comment so that this tangled mystery may be solved.