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Helping Karl
Associated Press
January 2008
Support for Capital Punishment
Remains Strong in Texas
State has long tradition of executions
HUNTSVILLE — In the middle of a prison cemetery known as Peckerwood Hill, inmates Mack Matthews and George Washington share a common fate.
The men were among five condemned killers who on Feb. 8, 1924, were strapped into Texas' new wooden electric chair for what the American-Statesman described as a two-hour "harvest of death."
State officials had just taken over execution duties from county sheriffs. They used the chair for more than 360 executions over the next 50 years.
Although the death penalty is under attack across the nation, support for capital punishment remains strong in Texas, where a history of frontier justice, a law-and-order culture and conservative politics keep the execution chamber busy.
"It's a tradition here and something we want to do, and we're not going to back away from what's going on elsewhere," said James Marquart, co-author of a history of the death penalty in the state.
Texas retired the electric chair in 1972, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executions under state death-penalty laws were unconstitutionally cruel and unusual.
Legislators quickly rewrote laws to reopen the death chamber using lethal injection, which was considered more humane. The revised law was approved by the courts in 1976, and executions resumed six years later.
"That's the context you have to put it in," said Marquart, director of the criminology and sociology programs at the University of Texas at Dallas. "We didn't wait for other states, other legislatures, other people to tell us what to do. They knew public opinion supported capital punishment and weren't going to back from it."
On Monday, the high court again heard arguments about whether execution is cruel and unusual punishment, this time considering the claims of two Kentucky inmates who say the three-drug injection could cause excruciating pain. Executions across the nation came to a halt in September after the court agreed to hear the Kentucky case.
Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, Texas has executed 405 inmates, more than any other state. Virginia is second with 98.
Texas also leads the nation in the number of prisoners set free after DNA evidence showed that they were innocent, although none of those 30 cases involved death row inmates.
Texas "might sentence people to death at rates that are not horribly out of line, but they execute more," said Michael Radelet, a University of Colorado capital punishment expert.
He said execution figures may reflect differences in attorney compensation, lack of public defenders and lack of attorneys to pursue appeals.
Twenty-six of 42 U.S. executions last year were in Texas. No other state had more than three. In 2006, Texas executed 24. Ohio was next with five. It's a scenario that has repeated nearly every year over two decades.
But even in the electric-chair days, Texas was among the most active death-penalty states.
The graves of Matthews and Washington are surrounded by others marked with the two- or three-digit inmate numbers reserved for those on death row.
In 1923, the state took over execution duties from county sheriffs, who had conducted public hangings.
"Legal local hangings by the 1920s were a long-established part of the state's landscape," Marquart wrote in his 1994 book "The Rope, the Chair and the Needle." "Indeed, one of the most enduring stereotypes of Texas surrounds the public hanging of cattle rustlers on the range or in dusty frontier hamlets."
