Death penalty decline continues in Texas, but opponents say system still flawed

AUSTIN — When Fort Worth convicted killer Quintin Jones went to the death chamber in Huntsville on May 19, there were no media witnesses to watch him die. It was the first time in 570 executions carried out in Texas since 1982 with no reporters to describe firsthand an inmate's final moments or to scribble the last words onto a notepad.

It wasn't because news outlets had grown bored with covering the nation's busiest death chamber. In fact, two reporters were waiting for their grim assignment in a nearby building within the Texas prison system's Walls Unit in Huntsville. Instead it was because the execution team had become so unfamiliar with the process that no one remembered that state law requires select members of the media be given the opportunity to watch it unfold.

Jones, who was 45 when he was put to death for the 1999 baseball bat bludgeoning of his 83-year-old great aunt and then stealing $30 from her purse to buy drugs, was the first person in Texas in nearly a year and only the fourth to die since 2019.

According to a report released Thursday by the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Texas in 2021 remained part of the growing national trend moving away from not only carrying out execution, but also away from imposing death sentences on even some of the brutal murderers who have been brought to justice.

More: US executions, death sentences fall in 2021 to lowest levels in decades, report finds

Only two inmates followed Jones to the Texas execution chamber in 2021 and Texas juries sent only three killers to death row all year. The numbers closely track those of 2020, but unlike last year, the current statistics were not a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the coalition's report.

"Texas is moving in the right direction and this movement is away from use of the death penalty, as we see reflected in the decline in death sentences and the slowing down of executions," said Kristin Houlé Cuellar, the coalition's executive director. "I think the challenge that we continue to be confronted with is the legacy of the death penalty in this state."

That legacy, she said, includes sending people of color both to death row and to the execution chamber at a disproportionate rate. And, she added, minimizing such factors as diminished mental acuity during capital murder trials and the appeals and clemency processes.

Those factors, Cuellar said, "should compel Texans to conclude it is time for the state to abandon the death penalty altogether.”

Even as death penalty usage declines in Texas, the state shows little sign that Cuellar's recommendation will be followed. More than six in 10 Texans support keeping the death penalty, polls show. And, even though at least four separate bills that would have abolished the death penalty during the 2021 legislative session, none of them received so much as a hearing in committee.

Ray Hunt, executive director of the Houston Police Officers Union, said the death penalty remains a vital tool for police and prosecutors when it comes to punishing capital murderers.

"Our union definitely supports the death penalty," Hunt said. "And I do too. Absolutely; 100%."

However, he said the case backlog caused in part by the pandemic has likely contributed to more plea agreements that took the death penalty off the table.

In addition, the 2005 law that gives juries the opportunity to send a killer to prison for life with no possibility of parole likely decreased the number of death sentences, he said.

"I knew that when we instituted life without parole we were going to have less people executed because it's easier for juries to make that decision," Hunt said.

'Death penalty law has evolved'

However, several counties – including heavily urbanized Harris, Dallas and Bexar – that for decades were enthusiastic champions of pushing for death sentences in capital murder cases have all but walked away from the practice.

Perhaps the most dramatic example is Harris County, the state's largest and home to Houston. Since capital punishment was allowed to resume by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, juries in Harris County have sentenced more than 200 inmates to death and 136 of them have been executed. That is more than any single state, besides Texas.

However, only three death sentences have been handed down in Harris County since 2018. And in September, the first Harris County inmate in nearly two years was sent to his death. Rick Rhoades, condemned for killing two brothers in a burglary attempt, spent nearly three decades on death row.

More: Texas House votes to end 'law of parties' in death penalty cases

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, who was first elected in 2016 on a promise to seek the death penalty only sparingly, in February took what once would have been an unheard-of step for someone in her office. She recommended that Texas' longest-serving condemned inmate be spared from the death sentence he was given in 1976 because the jury at the time was not instructed to weigh his mental illness.

The inmate, Raymond Riles, is no longer on death row and is serving a life sentence.

“Death penalty law has evolved and now requires jurors to be able to meaningfully consider and weigh mitigation evidence about an offender such as childhood abuse and trauma,” Ogg said. “In 1976, Riles’ capital murder jury was not given this opportunity.”

No inmate from Travis County, home to Austin, has been executed since 2010. That trend will likely continue. Travis County Attorney Jose Garza was elected in 2020 promising not only never to seek the death penalty, but also to review the cases of the county's five death row inmates "to ensure that there are no forensic, evidentiary, or legal issues that should cause the conviction to be called into question."

Public support strong, but waning

Richard Dunham, who runs the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., said executions in 2021 remained at a modern-era low and that Texas is one of only five states to carry out executions this year. The others are Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri and Oklahoma. Dunham also noted that Virginia, the state second to Texas in the number of executions since 1976, abolished its death penalty this year. The federal government executed three inmates this year.

"The death penalty grew increasingly geographically isolated in 2021 and public support dropped to its lowest levels in a half-century,” Dunham said.

But that decline in public support nationwide is only modest, according to a mid-year poll by the Pew Research Center. The nonpartisan think tank found that 60% and American adults support use of the death penalty in at least some cases. That's down 5 percentage points from 2019 in the Pew Center's polling.

The death penalty remains more popular in Texas than in the nation as a whole, according to an April 2021 poll by the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune. But that support has declined far sharper in Texas that in the country at large: 63% of all Texans expressed support for death penalty, but in 2015 the UT/TT poll showed support for the death penalty at 75%. Five years earlier, nearly 80% of Texans favored the death penalty.

The tumbling public support tracks the decline in executions. In the five-year period ending in 2006, Texas executed 123 inmates. That works out to an average of just under 25 per year. In the next five-year bloc, 98 inmates, or annual average of about 20, went to the death chamber.

But the average between 2012 and 2016 plummeted to less than 10. The average number of executions for the five-year stretch that ends this year is seven.

Racial disparity

Cuellar, of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said that despite the decline in executions she expects the disparate application of it will continue. Four of the 10 most recent inmates sent to death row, are Black, she said.

And, off the 199 inmates on Texas death row, 90 of them are Black. That is roughly 45% while Blacks comprise less than 12% of the state's total population. And of the 573 inmates put to death in Texas in the modern era, 36% were Black.

“Texas’s death penalty is a mess," Cuellar said, noting the racial disparity. "And it’s a mess of its own making."

John C. Moritz covers Texas government and politics for the USA Today Network in Austin. Contact him at jmoritz@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @JohnnieMo.

This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: Texas executions on decline while death penalty issues linger