Death penalty in Texas

Résumé du document

Gary Graham, Delma Banks, Odell Barnes, Napoleon Beazley, Darlie Lynn Routier... these are the names of people who have been executed by the state of Texas. I was surprised to realize that on the total number of cases that we were presented, Texas was often the "killing state? at stake. It became a ritual to say in our class that no one should ever get in trouble in Texas, because this is a state that usually does not forgive. Moreover, studying Karla Faye Tucker's case gave me the opportunity to understand the death penalty system in Texas.

Extraits

[...] These statistics show that an intensive use of the death penalty does not make a state a safer place to live in and, as a result, it shows that death penalty is not an efficient mean of action to fight against crime. The problems in implementing the death penalty in Texas are a warning to the rest of the country that it is wading into a swamp that it should avoid. The death penalty skews the process of prosecution and leads to official abuse. [...]

[...] Today, Texas has reached the number of 300 executions since the new era of the lethal injection killing has started 20 years ago. It has taken the state 20 years to do in the modern era of its death what it took three and a half decades to achieve in the pre-Furman years[5]. While the state of Texas accounts for less than 10 per cent of the USA's population, it has been responsible for more than a third of the national judicial death toll since 1976[6]. However, the death penalty in Texas is in a state of crisis. [...]

[...] The rate of compensation often determines the quality of representation. The Spangenberg Report concluded that defending death penalty cases in Texas is frequently a losing financial venture for attorneys: "The rate of compensation provided to court-appointed attorneys is absurdly low and does not cover the cost of providing representation."[19] Without adequate compensation, it would be unrealistic to expect the consistent provision of a thorough defense. Hence, the consequences of poor representation can be disastrous for the defendant. After a defendant is sentenced to death in Texas, their direct appeal and habeas corpus review are conducted simultaneously. [...]

[...] One such "expert" is Dr. James Grigson -or "Dr. Death," as he came to be known. In Texas, jurors are required to determine "whether there is a probability that the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society."[13] Naturally, a jury would give considerable weight to a state psychiatrist who unhesitatingly predicts with scientific certainty that the person sitting in front of them will invariably kill again if he is allowed to live. [...]

[...] I was surprised to realise that on the total number of cases that we were presented, Texas was often the “killing state” at stake. It became almost a ritual to say in our class that no one should ever get in trouble in Texas, because this is a state that usually does not forgive. Moreover, studying personally Karla Faye Tucker's case gave me the chance to deepen my analysis of the death penalty system in Texas and, again, I thought it was valuable to dedicate my final paper to this topic. [...]