Our Mission: to establish a fair and just criminal justice system in Texas,
with an emphasis on improving the quality of representation afforded those facing the death penalty.
Texas has accounted for more than one-third of all modern executions (1976 to the present) in the United States with 405 executions as of May 6, 2008.
Death Penalty Information Center & Texas Department of Criminal Justice
There are 369 inmates on Texas' death row today and Texas executed 26 individuals in 2007.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice Death Row Data 2008
In 2006, 53 inmates were executed in the United States, 24 of them in Texas.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice Death Row Data 2006
A death penalty case in Texas costs taxpayers an average of $2.3 million, about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years.
A review of the death penalty's cost, including six years of appeals, by the Dallas Morning News for the story "Executions Cost Texas Millions" March 1992
Tarrant County, Texas sent three inmates to death row, at a cost of about $250,000 for each trial, said Alan Levy, Assistant Criminal District Attorney in Tarrant. "The minimum cost is a couple hundred thousand, no matter how you cut it," he said. This estimate is for the prosecution costs only, not defense expenses, and reflects costs for the first trial only, not subsequent appeals.
Evan Mandery's Capital Punishment: A Balanced Examination (2005)
In capital cases, Texas courts continue to allow unreliable expert opinions of violence risk to influence the jury's decision whether to impose a life or death sentence. Studies documenting the risk of future violent behavior of capital inmates reveal that only 5% of capital defendants predicted by experts to constitute “continuing threats to society” in fact committed subsequent serious acts of violence in prison. These studies illustrate that death sentences which hinge on the question of an inmate's "future dangerousness" are inaccurate and unreliable. Texas is one of only a few states which allow such speculative testimony to influence the jury's decision about sentencing.
Predictions of Future Dangerousness in Capital Murder Trials (Law and Human Behavior 2/2005)
In an interview with South Texas Catholic News in October of 2006, Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the court with jurisdiction over federal courts in Texas, stated, "Also profoundly troubling is the risk that an innocent man will be executed. I must say that from my experience with capital cases, there is usually a great deal of evidence that the defendant is, in fact, guilty. But the lengthy investigation of the Houston crime lab, which exposed evidence of serious problems such as falsified test results, including DNA test results, and the tailoring of report to fit police theories certainly suggests that even scientific evidence, to which we normally attach considerable confidence, can be flawed. Only God’s justice is perfect justice. The assessment of the death penalty, however well designed the system for doing so, remains a human endeavor with a consequent risk of error that may not be remediable."
Black and Hispanic offenders make up 68% of the current death row population in Texas. The US Census for Texas indicates that the Black and Hispanic/Latino population of Texas is 46.5%. Studies indicate that race, particularly race of victim, continues to play a role in who is sentenced to death in the United States. (US: Death by Discrimination - The Continuing Role of Race in Capital Cases, April 2003, The Justice Project ) A defining moment on this issue came in 1987, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal of Warren McCleskey, an African American man condemned to death in Georgia for the murder of a white police officer. The Justices had been presented with a detailed study showing that defendants who killed whites in Georgia were more than four times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed non-whites, a probability that was even higher if the defendant was black and the victim white. A majority of Justices held that "apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system", and that for a defendant to be successful in an appeal, he or she would have to provide "exceptionally clear proof" that the decision-makers in his or her particular case had acted with discriminatory intent. Warren McCleskey was executed in 1991.
Of 38 states that administer the death penalty, only Texas and three others rely on a fragmented system of court-appointed lawyers to handle death penalty writs of habeas corpus -- complicated appeals meant to ensure that death sentences are legal and constitutional. The overwhelming majority of states provide defense representation through an institution of competent, committed lawyers who have sufficient expertise, training, and oversight.
There are hundreds of people on death row in Texas who were defended by attorneys who had investigative and expert expenses capped at $500. In some rural areas in Texas, lawyers have received no more than $800 to handle a capital case.
Statement before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee on Fairness, Reliability and Federal Habeas Corpus Procedures July 13, 2005 by Bryan A. Stevenson, Director, Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama
