Death Penalty Report: We’re Mostly Killing People Sentenced Decades Ago

Texas juries sentenced dozens of people to execution every year at the height of the death penalty's popularity, from the 1980s through the early 2000s. The state carried out regular executions during this period as well – at least one a month, often two. But as shown in the year-end report from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, things were different by 2022. Juries practically abandoned capital punishment this year, sentencing just two people to death statewide. The number killed was also historically low; the state set dates to execute eight people and carried out only five.

The irony, says Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of TCADP and author of their annual review of Texas death penalty developments, is that while the state is turning away from the death penalty today, the institutions that defend it continue to kill those condemned 20 and 30 years ago. "The individuals set for execution likely would meet a different fate if they were charged and tried today," Cuellar said.

In defending capital punishment, institutions like the Texas Attorney General's Office and courts from the local level to the Supreme Court rationalize or ignore the prosecutorial sloppiness and corruption inextricably connected to the "tough on crime" era. The era saw terrible legal representation for capital defendants, the widespread use of false and misleading testimony, and juries' blithe determinations that defendants would continue to be dangerous throughout their lives – a requirement for a death sentence to be imposed in Texas.

These determinations of future dangerousness have proven unreliable as prisoners age on death row. For example, Carl Buntion and Stephen Barbee were both frail and unhealthy at their executions this year, and required the use of wheelchairs – not the kind of people who could credibly be called dangerous. Nonetheless, judges in six separate state and federal courts rubber-stamped their executions. Four of those killed this year had histories of childhood trauma that were never properly considered and that might have spared them from the death penalty, among them John Ramirez, killed in October with his pastor Dana Moore praying at his side.

Of the three death row inmates who received stays of execution from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals this year, Melissa Lucio is the most well-known. She came within two days of being executed despite an outpouring of global support and overwhelming evidence that the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah, was a tragic accident, not a homicide. In April, the CCA ordered the court that convicted her to consider new evidence of her innocence.

Cuellar's report states that as of Dec. 12, Texas has 192 people on death row, the smallest figure since 1985. That number will further decline as prosecutors in rural counties pursue sentences of life without parole rather than death to save money and provide victims with closure. Prosecutors in Texas' urban counties are eschewing the death penalty for the same reasons but also on moral grounds, since the punishment is used disproportionately against people of color and those with intellectual disabilities and, not coincidentally, sometimes against people who are actually innocent.

Increasingly, the people who Cuellar hopes to help save from execution are in their 50s and 60s and have spent decades on death row. "Our struggle is with reckoning with this legacy of injustice, reckoning with the excessive use of the death penalty throughout the Eighties and Nineties." she told us. "If you look at the eight people who have execution dates already in 2023, five of them are from 2000 or prior."