Texas still top state for the death penalty (Petra.)

Texas still top state for the death penalty
Posted Saturday, Dec. 31, 2011
BY ANNA M. TINSLEY

atinsley@star-telegram.com

With six executions scheduled for the first three months of 2012 -- and more than twice as many executions as any other state on the books last year -- Texas is poised to continue leading the nation in executions despite a nationwide slowdown in capital punishment.

Despite dropping to a 15-year low in 2011, Texas continues to lead the nation in the number of executions with 13 even as questions are raised nationwide about the wrongful conviction of inmates and petitions call on the U.S. to abolish capital punishment. Last year, 43 prisoners were executed nationwide.

"Clearly, Texas is known as the capital of capital punishment," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center. "The high number of death sentences ... [has] led to the high number of executions.

"Ultimately, this stems from strong public support for the death penalty in Texas," he said. "In almost every other state, the death penalty is used more selectively, more cautiously and with greater protections for defendants."

Alabama, which had the second most executions, sent six inmates to the death chamber in 2011. Other states with more than one execution were Ohio with five, Georgia and Arizona each with four, and Oklahoma, Florida and Mississippi each with two, center statistics show.

These numbers are down from 2010, when there were 46 executions nationwide (17 in Texas) and from 2009, when there were 52 (24 in Texas), according to the center.

"Executions have dropped by about 50 percent since the late 1990s," Dieter said. "With a growing concern about whether some of those convicted are actually innocent, jurors, prosecutors, judges and legislators [are] more cautious about the use of the death penalty."

That gives some hope that Texas and other states at some point will end executions.

"I think that we are in the very beginning phases in Texas of the end of the death penalty," said Rick Halperin, the Amnesty International state death penalty abolition coordinator. "It won't happen in this state anytime soon, but we are reaching a point where, sooner or later, it is going to end.

"Some day we will look back and shake our heads that we thought this was the best we could do -- kill people."

Texas, home to what has long been dubbed the "conveyor belt of death," has executed more people than any other state -- 477 since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. The states closest to Texas in total number of executions are Virginia, with 109, and Oklahoma, with 96, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

"Everybody knows Texas kills a lot of people," said Halperin, also a human-rights professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Inmates were executed by hanging until 1923, when the state switched to using the electric chair. By 1977, Texas officials adopted the current method of execution: lethal injection.

Recently, at least one drug used in lethal injections -- sodium thiopental, a sedative -- has been harder to obtain since the European Union began restricting the sale of the drug to countries that haven't abolished capital punishment.

While officials say the supply shortage has delayed some U.S. executions, many states such as Texas had already switched to a different sedative, pentobarbital. But recent reports show that the only U.S.-licensed manufacturer of pentobarbital is selling the product to a different manufacturer, which could affect the availability of the alternative drug.

Nationwide, more than 30 states still allow the death penalty, although only 27 have put someone to death in the past decade. Oregon, Illinois, New Jersey and New Mexico are among the states that stopped executions in recent years, according to the death penalty information center.

At its peak in recent years, Texas executed 40 inmates in 2000. Since then, the number has fluctuated.

Some chalk the waning number of executions up to Texas prosecutors offering -- and jurors choosing -- a life-without-parole sentence, which became an option for those convicted of capital murder after Sept. 1, 2005.

Since then, nearly 400 people, including more than two dozen from Tarrant County, have been sentenced to life without parole, state records show.

"It's clear that people are troubled by the possibility of incarcerating or possibly executing innocent people," Halperin said. "The justice system is flawed and people understand that.

"We really just want to know as a society that we can be safe from [violent people]," he said. "Life without parole does provide that."

Questions of innocence

In recent years, the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham prompted a renewed debate about the merits of capital punishment in Texas.

Willingham was executed Feb. 17, 2004, for setting a 1991 house fire that killed his three young daughters. Through the years, he maintained his innocence and reasserted his claims of innocence in his final statement just before he was executed.

Gov. Rick Perry, who described Willingham as a "monster," and other officials said evidence supported the jury's decision. The state fire marshal has said the investigation was thorough and accurate; two arson experts who re-examined the investigation said it relied on outdated concepts and did not support a finding of arson.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission reviewed the case, concluding in 2011 that discredited scientific methods were used in the investigation, but an attorney general ruling stated that the commission has no jurisdiction in the case.

Other cases have been reviewed as well, such as the case of Fort Worth's Tim Cole, who died in prison after he was wrongfully convicted in the death of a Texas Tech student. His relatives fought to gain a posthumous pardon for Cole -- which they ultimately received.

The issue of capital punishment even seeped into the presidential race when, during a 2011 GOP debate, moderator Brian Williams noted that Perry has presided over more executions than "any other governor in modern times."

After the crowd cheered, Williams asked Perry whether he has "struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?" Perry said no.

"I've never struggled with that at all," Perry said. "If you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you're involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is you will be executed."

Since Perry took office in late 2001, 238 people have been executed. During former Gov. George W. Bush's six-year tenure, 152 people were executed, records show.

Perry said during the debate that he believes Texas has a fair execution process in place. "It's a state-by-state issue, but in the state of Texas, our citizens have made that decision, and they made it clear, and they don't want you to commit those crimes against our citizens, and if you do, you will face the ultimate justice," Perry said.

Calls to repeal

In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI called for an end to capital punishment, and a group of Catholic theologians petitioned the U.S. government to end executions.

"The criminal justice system is a human institution that can sometimes be biased or mistaken," according to the document partially written by Tobias Winwright, an associate professor of theological ethics at Missouri-based Saint Louis University. "We hoped that the statement ... would generate further study and discussion of this issue -- and ultimately contribute to the abolition of the death penalty in the United States.

"More and more Christians are seeing that the death penalty, though once permitted in places in the Bible, is not consonant with the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, who himself was an innocent victim of capital punishment."

Anna M. Tinsley, 817-390-7610

Twitter: @annatinsley

http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/12/31/3627274/texas-still-top-state-for-the.html

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