by Damozel (public domain photograph from Wikipedia Commons) | Texas, which now performs 60% of the executions in the U.S. is not "bucking the trend." Since I live in Florida, I am not in position to feel much moral superiority. But even though we perform our share of executions, at least we don't perform 60% of the country's total. (Cold comfort is better than no comfort at all.) The New York Times reports:
This year’s death penalty bombshells — a de facto national moratorium, a state abolition and the smallest number of executions in more than a decade — have masked what may be the most significant and lasting development. For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all American executions took place in Texas.
But enthusiasm for executions outside of Texas has dropped sharply. Of the 42 executions in the last year, 26 were in Texas. The remaining 16 were spread across nine other states, none of which executed more than three people. Many legal experts say the trend will probably continue.
Indeed, said David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston who has represented death-row inmates, the day is not far off when essentially all executions in the United States will take place in Texas. (NYT)
Wonkette, in a post written by Greg Wasserstrom, Texan:
The Times points out that Texas doesn’t condemn more people to death on average than any other state with capital punishment given its murder rate. The difference is that when another state sentences someone to death, that person may never actually be executed, or will sit on death row for decades before being killed. In Texas, they will kill you, like, tomorrow if they can and if tomorrow is already full, they’ll kill you the day after.
This is due largely to the fact that the district attorneys set the execution dates, as well as and some other crazy quirks in the justice system designed by people who love to kill. So much so that, for a long time, the crime lab in Harris County — the county that contains Houston and where most death sentences come from — had a real problem with, you know, maintaining its evidence (oops, still does!). In Illinois, they emptied out death row upon a similar but far less over-the-top revelation; in Texas, they keep on cranking them out (the police chief in charge at the time is running for DA). This is one of the only things the state government does efficiently....The state will continue executing people until you East Coast Liberals invade this place and even then Texas will continue executing people, God damn it. “Lone Star” doesn’t just mean cheap beer, comprende?
In more temperate vein, Matthew Yglesias:
I'd known that in the modern period just five states -- Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida, and Missouri -- were responsible for some huge proportion of total executions (see map) and that, in general, the death penalty is obviously being applied very differently from place to place.... I used to be a death penalty proponent.. And I still think, in principle, that it's not always wrong to execute people. But at the systems level, actually existing capital punishment in the United States is clearly a mess. Your odds of dying for your crime have much, much, much more to do with where you committed your crime and your socioeconomic status than anything about the nature of your crime...and Harry Blackmun's conclusion that he had to simply refuse to "tinker with the machinery of death" seems more and more sensible to me as time goes on.
Memeorandum here. Other blog reactions include: TalkLeft, The Carpetbagger Report, Wonkette
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