End Texas’ flawed and costly death penalty
Texas has executed three prisoners this year, its lowest yearly total since 1996. With no death warrants pending for the remainder of the year, it appears three will be all the executions Texas carries out in 2020.
Some people will read that number and think Texas needs to step it up and execute more. Those folks, however, would be making a big mistake.
Here is why:
First, capital punishment in Texas, like other execution states, is riddled with errors. Just ask Anthony Graves, a Black man convicted of killing six members of a Somerville family. Graves spent 18 years in prison, 12 years of it on death row.
On the day of the murders, Graves was miles from Somerville. He had no motive for murder. He did not know the victims. The real killer even said, as he was about to be executed, that Graves had nothing to do with the murders. Eventually Graves was exonerated and released from prison, the victim of a savage miscarriage of justice.
Graves was actually a lucky man. He’s alive. Carlos DeLuna didn’t fare so well. DeLuna was convicted of a killing at a Corpus Christi gas station in 1983 and executed in 1989.
Thanks to law professor James Liebman and students at Columbia Law School, we probably know more about the DeLuna
case than any other criminal case in the 20th century. Their book, “The Wrong Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution,” painstakingly details how Carlos Hernandez, not Carlos DeLuna, committed the murder. It was a case of the wrong Carlos.
De Luna is not the only mistake. Cameron Todd Willingham, Ruben Cantu and quite likely others have been wrongly executed in Texas. Then there are the 13 men exonerated from Texas’ death row after coming close to execution before their innocence was established. In
short, our death penalty system is full of mistakes.
A major study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 estimated the national rate of error in death sentencing cases at 4.1 percent. That’s a lot of error in a system where lives hang in the balance. That’s a lot of innocent people on death row.
Second, capital punishment costs taxpayers a ton of money. A 1992 economic assessment by the Dallas Morning News on the total costs of a death penalty case — trial, appeals, time on death row
and execution — pinned the cost at $2.3 million per case. In 2020 numbers, that is almost $4.3 million. Life without parole is considerably less expensive.
The entire death penalty process includes not one but two trials — one for guilt, one for punishment. The time and expense of simply seating a jury in a capital case can extend for weeks and cost many thousands of dollars.
The death penalty does not mean the convicted go to execution right away. Nationally, the average time between sentencing and execution is just over 20 years. Part of the reason for this is that the U. S. Supreme Court’s position is “death is different,” and the appellate process is long, complicated and costly.
Third, there are profound and deep moral costs with the death penalty. The entire apparatus is infused with racism and economic injustice. Black people, especially poor Black people, are disproportionately impacted by the death penalty. The inequality is especially vivid when examining the race of murder victims. Killers of whites are far more likely to be given death sentences than killers of Blacks. This is not an opinion; it is a fact.
A recent article in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review examining 40 years of Texas death sentences found that defendants accused of murdering white female victims are nearly three times more likely to be sentenced to death “than one would expect in a system that is blind to race and gender.”
The good news for most Texans is that the death penalty does not really affect them. Most have never served on a jury in a death penalty case. Most do not have close family members who were murdered. Most do not have relatives on death row.
But if you really believe that we should practice justice in Texas, then the death penalty does affect you. Our death penalty is an affront to human rights and an injustice of epic proportions. Give it up, Texas. Let it go.