I think it’s safe to say the culture of life is not exactly thriving in the state of Texas.
This year’s death penalty bombshells — a de facto national moratorium, a state abolition and the smallest number of executions in more than a decade — have masked what may be the most significant and lasting development. For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all American executions took place in Texas.
Over the past three decades, the proportion of executions nationwide performed in Texas has held relatively steady, averaging 37 percent. Only once before, in 1986, has the state accounted for even a slight majority of the executions, and that was in a year with 18 executions nationwide.
As it turns out, it’s not that Texas has experienced a sudden boost in blood thirst; it’s that most of the country has stemmed the execution tide. There were 42 executions over the last year, from a total of 10 states. Nine states carried about a combined total of 16 death sentences, while Texas executed 26 people. No other state killed more than three.
University of Houston law professor David Dow, who has represented death-row inmates, told the NYT we will likely reach a point in which practically all executions in the United States will take place in Texas.
“The reason that Texas will end up monopolizing executions,” he said, “is because every other state will eliminate it de jure, as New Jersey did, or de facto, as other states have.”
Perhaps it’s time for Texas to stop taking the lead in the wrong direction?
Yglesias added:
I’d known that in the modern period just five states — Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida, and Missouri — were responsible for some huge proportion of total executions … and that, in general, the death penalty is obviously being applied very differently from place to place. But Adam Liptak points out that in 2007, Texas alone accounted for 60 percent of total executions in the United States.
I used to be a death penalty proponent. And I still think, in principle, that it’s not always wrong to execute people. But at the systems level, actually existing capital punishment in the United States is clearly a mess. Your odds of dying for your crime have much, much, much more to do with where you committed your crime and your socioeconomic status than anything about the nature of your crime. In theory, I think you could have a fair system that involved some number of executions. In practice, though, it barely seems doable and Harry Blackmun’s conclusion that he had to simply refuse to “tinker with the machinery of death” seems more and more sensible to me as time goes on.
As for Texas, the state’s approach seems to be in desperate need of reform.
The rate at which Texas sentences people to death is not especially high given its murder rate. But once a death sentence is imposed there, said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, prosecutors, state and federal courts, the pardon board and the governor are united in moving the process along. “There’s almost an aggressiveness about carrying out executions,” said Mr. Dieter, whose organization opposes capital punishment.
I’ve heard the phrase, “Don’t mess with Texas,” but it’s clearly time to mess with the state’s system of executions.