 |
| The Walls Unit, Huntsville, Texas |
State remains defiant against death penalty opponents here, abroad
The illuminated clock set in the red-brick facade of the Walls Unit might be the most dreaded timepiece in Texas. Minute by minute, it ticks away dreary years behind bars. On some days - 15 times last year, 40 times in 2000 - its black hands signal another criminal justice milestone.
6 o'clock, the hands say. Another killer will be dead and gone.
Barring a last-minute stay, Kimberly McCarthy on June 26 will become the 500th Texas killer to be executed since the state re-activated trhe death penalty in 1976. Texas leads the nation's 33 death penalty states in executions, killing more than the next 5 most active states combined.
Virginia places 2nd with 110 executions.
Minutes before the killing hour, McCarthy, 52, condemned for the 1997 murder-robbery of 71-year-old Dorothy Booth in Lancaster, will be strapped to a gurney in a room deep within the 164-year-old prison. Then, as a warden and chaplain stand silently nearby, she will be injected with a lethal dose of a drug commonly used to euthanize cats and dogs.
McCarthy will be the 4th woman in Texas executed by injection.
Killers from Harris County, Texas' most populous, fill the Polunsky Unit's death row. Since 1982, 118 Harris County killers have been executed. 50 Dallas County killers have been put to death; 37 from Bexar County.
Typical of the extremes in the death penalty debate are Ray Hunt, the Houston Polcie Officers Union president who calls for expanding the death penalty to cases of brutal child abuse, and Anthony Graves, who was sentenced to die for murders he did not commit.
"There's no doubt in my mind," Hunt said when asked if executions have made Texas safer. "The 500 people who are executed - they have no opportunity to brutally murder again."
Countered Graves, who was released from prison in 2010 after prosecutors admitted he wrongly had been convicted in the August 1992 killings of 6 Somerville residents: "For me, the death penalty is a slap in the face. I spent 18 years in prison, 12 of them on death row with 2 execution dates, and it doesn't even slow down. It says to me: 'Your life has no value.'"
Known executions date to 1819, a period in which Texas was a Spanish possession. Hanging - carried out at the county level - remained the primary manner of execution in the state until 1923.
In that year, the authority to execute - employing the new-to-Texas electric chair - was assumed by the state, in part, Texas Prison Museum staff says, because public hangings attracted unruly crowds.
6 black men were electrocuted on Feb. 8, 1924, the Walls' inaugural day as the official Texas death house. Warden R.F. Coleman resigned rather than pull the switch.
"It just couldn't be done, boys," he told reporters. "A warden can't be a warden and a killer, too. The penitentiary is a place to reform a man, not to kill him."
An additional 355 convicted killers were electrocuted before the U.S. Supreme Court's 1972 Furman vs. Georgia ruling brought capital punishment to a nationwide halt.
The Furman ruling and those in 2 related cases found the death penalty cruel and unusual, in part because of the lack of uniform criteria under which it could be imposed. Texas and other death penalty states rewrote their laws. The high court approved the changes in ts 1976 Gregg vs. Georgia decision, and executions resumed.
Texas' 1st post-Gregg execution, that of Charlie Brooks, condemned for the abduction and murder of Fort Worth auto mechanic David Gregory, took placed on Dec. 7, 1982. Brooks, 40, also was the 1st killer to be executed by lethal injection.
Slowly Texas' revamped death penalty gained momentum. By the late 1990s, executions topped 35 a year. A record 40 killers were put to death in 2000.
15 Texas killers were executed in 2012; McCarthy will be the 8th this year.
Source: Dallas Morning News, June 17, 2013
.jpg)
