Perry ad touches off battle over facts

AUSTIN (KXAN) - The ad begins with a woman sitting next to a large, framed photo of a police officer, setting a scene from four years before when she lost her husband to a violent killer.

"My husband Rodney was murdered in the line of duty by an undocumented alien,” said Joslyn Johnson, also a Houston police officer.

During this campaign season, Johnson has been vocal to the media about her opposition to Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White’s former role as Houston mayor, laying blame for her husband's death at his feet. Rodney Johnson was shot to death by an illegal immigrant and convicted sex offender in 2006.

White, she said, “had his chance…to secure our safety, and he failed.”

Scooping up that anti-White testimony, Republican opponent Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign is now airing an ad featuring the bereaved widow - saying White supports “sanctuary city” policies and suggesting that Johnson's husband is dead because of White.

The ad has unleashed a new round of he-said-he-said in the increasingly heated battle for the governor's seat - this time over the definition of "sanctuary city" and whose policies are to blame for the death of a police officer.

It also prompted White to bash the Perry ad as "shameless."

“It’s a sign of desperation that they would exploit the grief of a widow on this particular issue,” Bill White said at a campaign stop in Austin Monday.

"Sanctuary city" is the term used to describe any U.S. city following practices to protect illegal immigrants. A “sanctuary city” is most often one not allowing city money or resources to enforce federal immigration laws - including banning police from asking about a person's immigration status. “Sanctuary city” is not an official legal term.

In the ad, Johnson says White “supported sanctuary city policies that made it difficult for officers to safely do their jobs.”

She's referring to the fact that Houston police and Harris County investigators don't, as a matter of policy, ask for the immigration status of people they contact - either victims, or suspects, or witnesses.

Quintero was detained by police three times before he shot Rodney Johnson to death during a traffic stop. His widow says that had police known he was an illegal immigrant then, and had been allowed to ask, he would have been in federal custody and unable to kill her husband.

White, however, blames a sex offender issue from the year Quintero, an illegal immigrant, killed Johnson’s husband during a traffic stop.

Quintero was charged in 1998 with indecency with a child - eight years before he killed Rodney Johnson - but his name was removed from the registry once he was deported.

White's office pointed that out at that time, criticizing the policy allowing the sex offender to be purged from the registry when he was deported.

White maintained that Quintero would not have been off the radar at the time of the shooting because he would have been routed back into the criminal justice system under the sex-offender registry laws when he was originally detained by police.

In 2006, shortly after the police officer’s death, White’s mayoral office pressed the Texas Department of Public Safety on the matter. But the names were kept off the public list because those deported offenders were no longer considered Texas residents. Shortly after White’s office brought the issue up, DPS changed its policy to include those deported offenders.

On Monday, in light of the scathing new ad, White revisited the issue. 

“For many years, the state of Texas under Rick Perry had a practice of removing from the sex offender list people who had been deported," White said. "They could come back and that wasn’t on their record.”

Perry’s campaign spokesperson Mark Miner told KXAN that state law enforcement had a list of those sex offenders available at that time to review when needed, but that the names were indeed purged from the registry.

But they maintain that White's support of "sanctuary city" policies were to blame for Johnson's death.

White says that statement is false because Houston in fact has no official ordinance designating it as a sanctuary city - only two cities in the entire country do.

He actually pushed for Houston to be included in the Secure Communities program - which allows local law enforcement to aid in checking immigration status. So now, if a person is arrested in Houston on a charge more serious than a misdemeanor, that person is fingerprinted and checked against a criminal and immigration database - which would check his or her immigration status.

White says this proves that he is not a sanctuary-city supporter.

The state’s Democratic Party also cites the Austin American Stateman’s PolitiFact Texas as saying the sanctuary city claim is false.

In a 2009 lawsuit against the city of Houston , which was ultimately dismissed, Johnson alleged that several instances could have prevented her husband’s death.

"Because of the policies, practices, and procedures at issue in this lawsuit,