Houston Chronicle Sunday

The death penalty

The most absolute of judicial punishment­s is in decline — and that’s a positive trend.

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The most popular exhibit on display at the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville has long been a high-backed wooden chair where some 360 inmates heard for the last time in their ill-fated lives the invitation, “Please have a seat.”

“Old Sparky” has been a museum piece since 1965, but during its 40 years as a capital-punishment piece of furniture, the chair could deliver 2,000 volts of electricit­y into a prisoner’s body. That was enough power to light 800 household lightbulbs — and to pop eyeballs out of sockets.

Although it would have been hard to imagine as recently as a decade ago, the death penalty itself may be on the way to becoming a relic of American history. In 2009, 118 individual­s were sentenced to death nationwide; the number in 2015 was 50 percent less. It’s more than 600 percent less since the peak in 1996 of 315. In 2015, juries returned the fewest number of new death sentences, 49, since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

Even in Texas, the state that has killed nearly five times as many people as the state with the second-most executions (Oklahoma), the numbers are down dramatical­ly. The last execution in the state was in April, the longest gap in executions since 2008. Six men have been executed so far this year, while 13 death sentences have been halted or delayed. Perhaps most surprising is that six were stopped by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, including four stays in four weeks. The state’s highest criminal court is packed with former prosecutor­s and yet it’s being very reluctant these days to sanction this most absolute of judicial penalties.

The death penalty statistics come from Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project, which concludes in a report released last month that “the death penalty in America is dying.”

The report notes that 31 states legally retain the death penalty, but only 14 imposed a single death sentence last year. Detailed local statistics are even more revealing: Of the 3,143 county or county equivalent­s in the United States, only 16 — or one half of 1 percent — imposed five or more death sentences between 2010 and 2015.

Harris County is one of the 16. Although more death sentences have been handed down here than in any other county, the report points out that death sentences have declined precipitou­sly in the county in the last decade. Between 1998 and 2003, during the tenure of District Attorney Johnny Holmes, Harris County sentenced 53 people to death. Between 2004 and 2009, the nation’s third most populous county, had 16. Since 2010, it has had 10. No Harris County jury has imposed the death penalty in a case involving a new defendant since August 2014.

The report also notes that those assessed the ultimate punishment often are young and are beset with intellectu­al impairment­s and severe mental illnesses or they’ve suffered from brain damage, abuse and trauma. “Some are likely innocent.”

Questions of morality aside, even the most impassione­d death-penalty district attorneys must acknowledg­e that capital cases are expensive, timeconsum­ing and prone to error. As they become rare, the whole issue of deterrence becomes moot.

“Americans may still be divided as to whether the death penalty is cruel, but there is no question that it is now unusual,” notes Matt Ford, writing in The Atlantic. With polls showing public support at its lowest levels since the U.S. Supreme Court revived capital punishment 40 years ago, it’s hard to imagine Harris County ever reverting to the Holmes days, easier to imagine the remaining outliers around the country finally succumbing to reality. The whole sordid business, as the Fair Punishment Project concludes, is “too broken to fix.”

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