Doubts soften embrace of capital punishment
HUNTSVILLE - Perhaps nothing symbolizes this state's swagger over being tough on crime like "Old Sparky," an electric chair that was used to execute 361 inmates and is now the centerpiece of a prison museum.
It sits minutes from the Texas penitentiary where it was forever unplugged 50 years ago this summer following the execution of Houston's Joseph Johnson Jr. for murdering a grocer.
While the oak chair is now a capital punishment relic photographed daily by visitors, this state's death row is undergoing what looks to be a historic shift.
Texas forged an international reputation as it has executed far more inmates than any other state in the nation since 1982, when it resumed capital punishment with lethal injection. But this year, Texas just may lose its distinction as the state carrying out the most executions annually, sitting in a three-way tie with Missouri and Florida. Each state has executed seven people so far this year.
In Texas, a slew of changes in capital punishment that have been trotted out over the past decade or so and are taking hold. Those include requiring better legal representation for people facing the death penalty, giving jurors the option of sentencing defendants to life in prison without parole, and increasing the use of DNA and other scientific testing. And significant to the change is the realization by lawmakers and others that the system that condemns someone is not bulletproof.
The state executed an average of 29 people annually from 1997 to 2007, with 40 in 2000, according to statistics maintained by the Death Penalty Information Center. But it is now on track to have no more than 11 this year, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the fewest number in 23 years.Texas is not getting weaker on crime, but getting smarter about who is sentenced to death by reducing the chances of condemning an innocent person, said former Gov. Mark White.
"We are starting to recognize that being tough on crime doesn't mean you have to be tough on innocent people," White told the Houston Chronicle. "We have learned a lot: use the cutting edge of science, and not just the fast draw of the Old West."
He pointed to more than a dozen Texas death row inmates who were convicted, only to years later be freed on the grounds they were innocent.
"Being tough on an innocent person, that ain't tough, that is stupid," White said. "Being tough on crime does not mean being careless in how you find a perpetrator."
Anthony Graves is among the innocent. He was exonerated four years ago in the 1992 Burleson County murder of a woman as well as her four grandchildren and daughter.
He had been convicted of helping Robert Carter in the murders, but from shortly after Carter's arrest to his last declaration from the gurney moments before his execution, Carter said Graves had no role.
Students in a University of St. Thomas journalism class worked with The Innocence Network at the University of Houston Law Center to review the Graves case, and Graves' lawyers later successfully argued that prosecutors elicited false statements from two witnesses and withheld two statements that could have changed the minds of jurors.
