Report: Executions in Texas on decline

Use of the death penalty in Texas has dropped sharply in recent years, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the election of prosecutors focused on criminal justice reform, a new report found.

Texas, which typically carries out the highest number of executions nationwide, executed three people in 2020, according to the year- end report by the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty, a statewide advocacy group. It was the lowest number statewide in nearly 25 years.

While executions in the Lone Star State were at that low, Texas was one of only two states — besides the federal government — that carried out executions during the pandemic.

“It is shameful ... to put anyone to death during a global pandemic,” said Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty, referring to the July execution of Billy Joe Wardlow.

Wardlow was sentenced to death in1995 in the killing of 82year- old Carl Cole during a botched attempt to steal Cole’s truck at his home in rural Morris County in East Texas. At the time, Wardlow was 18.

In a last-ditch effort in July, attorneys representing him asked the Texas Supreme Court and Gov. Greg Abbott to halt his execution because of the coronavirus pandemic. The court denied the motion, and Abbott took no action.

According to the statewide report, Texas juries sentenced two people to death last year — one in February and the other in March — before the coronavirus suspended most court proceedings.

The number of death sentences and executions in Texas and across the U.S. has steadily decreased over the last two decades. Texas executions peaked in 2000, when 40 people were put to death, the report states. In 2019, nine inmates were executed.

The decrease comes as public support for the death penalty has waned, especially as alternative sentences such as life without the possibility of parole, have become available.

Prior to 2005, when thenGov. Rick Perry signed a law al---

“It is shameful … to put anyone to death during a global pandemic.”

Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty

lowing juries to sentence defendants to life without parole, the alternative was life in prison with the chance of parole after 40 years.

Opponents of capital punishment argue that the sentence is unfairly applied based on race and poses the risk of killing individuals with claims of actual innocence. According to the report, 70 percent of death sentences over the last five years have been imposed on people of color.

Of those, 38 percent were Black defendants. In comparison, roughly 13 percent of the state’s population is Black, according to 2019 estimates from the Census Bureau.

“As Texas moves away from the death penalty, what remains is an arbitrary, unfair and racially biased punishment,” Cuellar said. “At this critical moment of reckoning with systemic racism, elected officials and the public must continue to confront our state’s deeply troubling legacy of injustice reflected in the death penalty.”

Cuellar said executions will likely continue to decline in the coming years, partly because of several district attorneys — including those in Harris, Dallas and Nueces counties — having vowed to curtail use of the death penalty.