Texas joins in trend of fewer executions

When convicted killer Quintin Jones of Fort Worth went to the death chamber in Huntsville on May 19, there were no media witnesses to watch him die.

It was the first time in 570 executions carried out in Texas since 1982 with no reporters to witness the final moments or scribble last words on a notepad.

It wasn’t because news outlets had grown bored with covering the nation’s busiest death chamber. In fact, two reporters were waiting for their grim assignment in a nearby building within the Texas prison system’s Huntsville Unit, commonly known as the Walls Unit. Instead, it was because the execution team had become so unfamiliar with the process that no one remembered that state law requires select members of the media be given the opportunity to watch it unfold.

Jones, who was 45 when he was put to death for the 1999 baseball bat bludgeoning of his 83-year-old great-aunt and the theft of $30 from her purse to buy drugs, was the first person to be executed in Texas in nearly a year and only the fourth since 2019.

According to a report released recently by the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Texas in 2021 remained part of a growing national trend of moving away from not only carrying out executions, but also imposing death sentences on even some of the most brutal murderers who have been brought to justice.

Only two inmates followed Jones to the Texas execution chamber in 2021, and Texas juries sent only three killers to death row all year. The numbers closely track those of 2020, but unlike that year’s statistics, these were not a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the coalition’s report.

“Texas is moving in the right direction and this movement is away from use of the death penalty, as we see reflected in the decline in death sentences and the slowing down of executions,” said Kristin Houlé Cuellar, the coalition’s executive director. “I think the challenge that we continue to be confronted with is the legacy of the death penalty in this state.”

That legacy, she said, includes sending people of color to death row and to the execution chamber at disproportionate rates. It also involves minimizing such factors as diminished mental acuity during capital murder trials and the appeals and clemency processes, she added.

Those factors, Cuellar said, “should compel Texans to conclude it is time for the state to abandon the death penalty altogether.”

Even as death penalty usage declines in Texas, the state shows little indication that Cuellar’s recommendation will be followed. More than 6 in 10 Texans support keeping the death penalty, polls show. And even though at least four bills that would have abolished the death penalty were filed during the 2021 legislative session, none received a hearing in committee.

Ray Hunt, executive director of the Houston Police Officers Union, said the death penalty remains a vital tool for police and prosecutors when it comes to punishing capital murderers.

Several counties – including heavily urbanized Harris, Dallas and Bexar – that for decades were enthusiastic champions of death sentences in capital murder cases have all but walked away from the practice.

Perhaps the most dramatic example is Harris County, the state’s largest and home to Houston. Since capital punishment was allowed to resume by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, juries in Harris County have sentenced more than 200 inmates to death, and 136 of them have been executed. That is more than any state besides Texas.

However, only three death sentences have been handed down in Harris County since 2018. And in September, the first Harris County inmate in nearly two years was sent to his death. Rick Rhoades, condemned for killing two brothers in a burglary attempt, had spent nearly three decades on death row.

Richard Dunham, who runs the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, said executions in 2021 remained at a modern-era low and that Texas is one of only five states to carry out any last year. The others are Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and Oklahoma. The federal government executed three inmates.