A Texas tradition

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP)

In a prison cemetery known as Peckerwood Hill, inmates Mack Matthews and George Washington shared a common fate as well as a burial plot. The men were among five condemned killers who on Feb. 8, 1924, were strapped into Texas’ new wooden electric chair for what the Austin American-Statesman described as a two-hour “harvest of death.”

At the time, 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 wide 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 such executions under state death-penalty laws were unconstitutionally cruel and unusual. Legislators quickly rewrote laws to reopen the death chamber using lethal injection, then 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 Mr. 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. [We] knew public opinion supported capital punishment, and weren’t going to back [away] 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 contend the three-drug injection could cause excruciating pain. Executions across the nation halted in September after the court agreed to hear the Kentucky case.

Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, Texas has executed 405 men and women — far more than any other state. Virginia is second with 98.

Texas further leads the nation in the number of prisoners convicted and later set free after DNA evidence showed 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 specialist. He said execution figures may reflect differences in attorneys’ compensation, lack of public defenders and lack of attorneys to pursue appeals.

Twenty-six of the 42 U.S. inmates executed last year were killed by the state of Texas. No other state killed more than three. In 2006, Texas executed 24. Ohio was next with five. It’s a scenario that has played out nearly every year over two decades.

But even in the electric-chair era, 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.

Before 1923, sheriffs of counties where felons were convicted conducted hangings.

“Legal local hangings by the 1920s were a long-established part of the state’s landscape,” Mr. 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.”

A list of executions in the U.S. from 1608 through 1972, compiled by capital-punishment historian Watt Espy, shows that Texas put 755 persons to death, ranking behind Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

That number does not account for at least 335 lynchings — only Mississippi and Georgia had more — during a 30-year period ending in 1918, according to a study published in 1919 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The lynchings, prevalent in the South after slavery was abolished, reflected a trend toward acceptance of capital punishment and lynchings “gave way to state-sanctioned executions,” Mr. Marquart speculated in his book. “It’s ingrained in the culture,” he said in an interview.

As governor in the mid-1980s, Mark White presided over the executions of 19 men.

“I think people of Texas are most fair-minded when presented with facts,” he said. “They’re not mean-spirited, but are supportive of strict enforcement of law and severe penalties for those who repeat their crimes.”

Mr. White, who was state attorney general when executions resumed here in 1982, said he wanted his office to be aggressive when handling the appeals of capital cases. That policy remains in effect today.

“My approach was: OK, everybody has adequate time to prepare an appeal, but let’s not delay it and risk creating a backlog,” he said.

That was what happened in New Jersey, which reinstated the death penalty in 1982 but has executed no one since 1963. Last month, it became the first state in four decades to abolish capital punishment.

Unless the Supreme Court declares capital punishment to be unconstitutional there is little likelihood that Texas will curtail its “harvest of death.”

The determined pursuit of the death penalty in Texas has invited criticism of overzealous judges and the prospect that innocent people may have been executed. The controversy intensified with September’s execution of Michael Richard, the last inmate in the nation to be put to death before the Supreme Court agreed to take the Kentucky case on lethal injection.

Judge Sharon Keller, presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, refused to keep the court open past 5 p.m. to let Richard’s attorneys file a late appeal that would have spared his life at least until the Supreme Court decided the Kentucky case. Judge Keller has declined to speak about her decision, but her campaign literature touts her as “a law-and-order judge.”

Fueling criticism of the death penalty are worries about innocent inmates on death row. Questions have been raised in a few executions since 1982, but no one has been proved wrongly executed.

“That may be the event that would end it,” Mr. Marquart said.