Texas too quick to execute the young

Re: “With death penalty, Texas clinging to a relic of the past,” Other Views, Sunday:

I write in support of the op-ed by Roger C. Barnes, who chairs the department of sociology at the University of the Incarnate Word, calling on the Editorial Board to take a moral stand against capital punishment in Texas.

To his list of well-founded objections to the death penalty as it is practiced in Texas, I would add one more: the cost exacted against youthful offenders.

I have examined the cases of 82 youthful capital offenders who were between the ages of 17 and 21 since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the 1970s. Nearly three-fourths of these offenders were Black or Hispanic; nearly all were poor; and most had experienced horrific abuses as children. In at least one case — that of 17-year-old Ruben Cantu from San Antonio’s South Side — Texas executed a person who was likely innocent.

Fueling the drive to convict and execute youthful offenders was “future dangerousness,” a requirement in the Texas death-penalty statute that calls on juries to decide whether a young person could be redeemed later in life.

This standard pushed prosecutors to portray defendants as violent, inhuman monsters and to dismiss or downplay mitigating evidence, including horrific childhood abuses. Some prosecutors, including Sam Millsap, the Bexar County district attorney who prosecuted Cantu’s case, have expressed regret and become vocal opponents of the death penalty.

This rush to execute youthful offenders was illustrated most recently in July, when the state executed Billy Joe Wardlow for a murder he committed as an 18-year-old in 1993. Wardlow shot a man while trying to steal a truck to flee an abusive home. He had no prior record of crime or violence.

Nevertheless, the prosecution went on to portray Wardlow as a “stone cold killer” and “an animal out in the wild” who “goes out and devours those who are weaker than him … those that are defenseless. Why does a wolf do that? A wolf does that because that’s just what he is, he’s a predator. … The wolf is totally without remorse because that’s what he is.”

This style of argumentation is consistent with nearly all of the 82 cases I have reviewed involving youthful capital offenders. It encouraged jurors to view an 18-year-old first-time offender as an animallike “predator” while erasing any consideration of troubled histories of childhood abuse, trauma and neglect, which often come to light during postconviction mitigation investigations. Moreover, it presents a deeply unreliable forecast of an unformed youthful offender’s likelihood to commit further violent acts in a secure prison setting.

The practice of executing youthful capital offenders on the basis of highly misleading, unreliable and at times outright false evidence is well documented in the historical record. I urge the Editorial Board to take a clear stand against the continuation of this shameful history.