As we close the door on the first decade of the 21st century, it’s a good time to look back at ten years of marching against the death penalty in Texas. When the death penalty is abolished in Texas, a large reason will be because of the organizing and organizing skills learned and applied by building the multi-group, diverse coalition that works each year to organize the annual march and that also works together the rest of the year on various events and campaigns around individual cases (like Kenneth Foster, Jeff Wood, Frances Newton and others) and issues including a moratorium, the Law of Parties, innocence, abolition and more. Each October since the march was first held in 2000, people from all walks of life and all parts of Texas, the U.S. and other countries have taken a day out of their year and gathered in Austin to raise their voices together and loudly express their united opposition to the death penalty. The annual march is a coming together of activists, family members of those on death row, community leaders, exonerated prisoners and all those calling for abolition.

The Houston Chronicle reports that as death sentences have decline, life without parole sentences have risen. People sentenced to life without parole are sentenced to die in prison, so they constitute a new kind of condemned person. The Texas Life Without Parole bill was passed in 2005. The author of the bill wanted to have three options in capital cases, 1) death, 2) life without parole, and 3) life with the possibility of parole after 40 years; however conservatives and Republicans refused to support the bill unless the possibility of parole after 40 years was removed from the bill. That left only two options, death and life without parole.

The article also points out that Bexar (San Antonio) and Tarrant County (Fort Worth) now send more people to death row than Harris County.



Exceprts: 

Bexar and Tarrant each sent eight newly convicted killers to death row in the four years since the law took effect, state prison data show. In the same period, larger Harris and Dallas counties sent six apiece, based on the Chronicle’s analysis of Texas Department of Criminal Justice death row arrivals.

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No one disputes Texas’ life-without-parole law has had another, more measurable impact.

Welcome to ‘life row’

Already, the 4-year-old law has created a kind of “life row” — a perpetual population of convicted killers and accomplices who can never win reductions in their sentence regardless of behavior, youth , mental deficiency or other factors. This group appears to be growing faster than death row itself. Texas’ death row population stands at 332, TDCJ data show. As of Nov. 30, a total of 226 inmates were serving life without parole.

Read the full article here.

David Brooks of the New York Times says that David Grann’s article on Todd Willingham was the “most powerful essay” he read all year and worthy of a Sidney Award. Read his entire article “The Sidney Awards“.

Every year, I give out Sidney Awards to the best magazine essays of the year. In an age of zipless, electronic media, the idea is to celebrate (and provide online links to) long-form articles that have narrative drive and social impact.

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The most powerful essay I read this year was David Grann’s “Trial by Fire” in The New Yorker. Grann investigated the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for murdering his three children by setting their house on fire.

In the first part of the essay, Grann lays out the evidence that led to Willingham’s conviction: the marks on the floor and walls that suggested that a fire accelerant had been splashed around; the distinct smoke patterns suggesting arson; the fact that Willingham was able to flee the house barefoot without burning his feet.

Then, in the rest of the essay, Grann raises grave doubts about that evidence. He tells the story of a few people who looked into the matter, found a miscarriage of justice and then had their arguments ignored as Willingham was put to death. Grann painstakingly describes how bogus science may have swayed the system to kill an innocent man, but at the core of the piece there are the complex relationships that grew up around a man convicted of burning his children. If you can still support the death penalty after reading this piece, you have stronger convictions than I do.

Twenty seven years ago today, on December 7, 1982 in Huntsville, the state of Texas carried out its first execution since 1964. Charlie Brooks was the first person executed in Texas after 18 years with no executions. The death penalty had been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 and then allowed again in a 1976 decision. Charlie Brooks was an African-American. In 1964, Texas had executed five people, all of them were African-Americans.

Since that first Texas execution in 1982, there have been a total of 447 executions in Texas, 24 this year. Executions in Huntsville had begun on February 8, 1924, when five people were executed in the state’s new electric chair in one night, all five were African-Americans. From 1924 to 1964, Texas executed 361 people by electric chair – 63.4% were African-American. It took 40 years from 1924 to 1964 for the state to execute 361 people. In the 27 years since 1982, Texas has executed 447 people, so executions have increased significantly since the early to mid-20th century. 208 of those 447 executions were conducted since Rick Perry became governor in 2000.

Prior to 1924, executions had been carried out by hanging in the counties where the people were convicted.

Five executions are already scheduled in Texas for 2010, including two in January.