Houston: Ground zero for the death penalty

Study shows Harris County is most active in capital punishment, driven by district attorney choices

If Harris County were its own state, it would have a more active death chamber than the entire country outside of Texas.

Of the 1,465 U.S. executions in the modern death penalty era, 125 have come from Harris County, or roughly 8 percent. The next-closest executioner is Dallas County, with 55 death sentences carried out since the Supreme Court reinstated the ultimate punishment in 1976.

Houston's reputation as ground zero for the death penalty, it seems, is well-earned - even though prosecutors have been less apt to dole out capital sentences in recent years.

While the numbers are stark, the reasons behind the Bayou City's apparent zeal for capital punishment are less apparent. It's not driven by public support for the practice. It's not driven by an unusually high crime rate, or by especially heinous murders.

So what is driving it? What sets apart jurisdictions that frequently turn to capital punishment?

That is one of the questions Frank Baumgartner and his co-authors explore in "Deadly Justice," a numbers-heavy study of capital punishment released this month.

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill political science professor took some time this week to field questions from Chronicle reporter Keri Blakinger about his new book and its implications in the Houston area. Here are excerpts from the interview:

Q: Harris County is known as the capital of capital punishment - why is that? Are Houstonians just more supportive of it?

A: Well, actually I would say two things. We got data from a Rice University Houston-area poll, and it turns out the public opinion in Houston is less supportive for the death penalty than in the rest of Texas. In general across the country, we don't find any correlation between public opinion and executions, and the reason for that is that if you don't support capital punishment you're not allowed to sit on a jury.

The key driver in the system is the choices that district attorneys make, because they start the process, and they get to pick and choose whether to seek death. Looking at all 3,000 counties in the U.S., there are just a few counties that have executed more than, say, 10 people - there's only 20 counties like that - and it's really astounding that there would be so much concentration in a few jurisdictions. There's really no rhyme or reason to it.

Q: It's not that Houston has more horrific crimes?

A: No, not at all. I think it's something about a local culture that develops around the courthouse. Most counties never go there, but a few counties happen to successfully carry through to the end a death sentence - and then when the next really bad murder happens the prosecutors say, "Well this is just as bad as that one where we sought death, so we kind of have to do it again this time."

Q: We hear a lot about botched executions; is this happening more than it used to, and why aren't we seeing these botched executions in Texas? Or is it just a matter of time?

A: Lethal injection is a medicalized procedure, but - in most states - no doctors are allowed to participate, so I think it does lend itself to botches in a way that other methods like firing squads or hangings did not.

But Texas has a lot more practice. So there have been fewer botches in Texas because, I think, the teams in the corrections department are relatively in practice. In carrying out 400 or 500 hundred executions, they've just done it a lot more.

Q: People always seem to express frustration over the length of the delays - sometimes it's 20 years. Is Texas an outlier in this, or is this a pretty normal time frame here?

A: The average as of 2015 is about 20 years delay from crime to execution, so that's pretty shocking. There are three shockers. One is the extreme delay - that's 20 years in solitary confinement. So it's 20 years of harsh punishment followed by execution. The other shocker is that we only carry out 13 percent of the death sentences. It's just astounding. And the third shocker is that even when the governor signs a death warrant it's not usually carried out.

On average, those things are canceled.

Q: How are the questions and discussions around the use of the death penalty changing?

A: The biggest change was in the 1990s: We started to pay serious attention to the concept of innocence and whether there might be innocent people on death row and whether we should celebrate it when we identify them and they're exonerated, or if we should interpret that number as catastrophic.

The innocence argument has really shaken people's faith that you can count on the government to get it right every single time.

Q: One of the topics that comes up a lot now - and has been written about a lot - is one of your chapter titles: "Is the death penalty dying?" Is it?

A: I think it's in a stranglehold.

The system is so tied up in knots, partly because of the concern of executing an innocent person. It's really hard to justify or have enthusiasm about a system so dysfunctional as the current modern death penalty, even if you're a prosecutor.

Source: Houston Chronicle, Keri Blakinger, November 26, 2017

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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