“Even as use of the death penalty remains historically low in Texas, it continues to be imposed disproportionately on people of color and dependent largely on geography. The arbitrariness of capital punishment and the persistent problem of wrongful convictions should compel Texans to abandon the death penalty altogether,” the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty concludes at the end of its exhaustive year-end review https://tinyurl.com/3tzcaxdj of death penalty developments in Texas in 2024.
Among the findings in the report:
- Of the eight people scheduled for execution, more than half were people of color.
- Of the five men executed in 2024, four were people of color, and one was white.
- Since 1982, Texas has executed 591 individuals. Of those 591, 262 were white, 324 were people of color, and five were of another race/ethnicity.
- Of the 591 people killed by the state, 115 were Black men convicted of killing white victims, while only six white people were convicted of killing Black individuals.
- Geographic disparities in death sentences in Texas continued, TCADP found. Harris County, which accounted for two of the five executions in 2024, has executed 135 people since 1982, “more than any state except Texas itself,” TCADP states.
The report covers the three stays of executions issued in 2024, including Ruben Gutierrez, scheduled to be killed in July, who “received a rare stay from the U.S. Supreme Court. . . . the second time in four years Gutierrez received an 11th hour reprieve from the Court.”
Robert Roberson, “a man with Autism, [who] spent more than twenty years on death row for a crime that did not occur,” based on the debunked “Shaken Baby Syndrome” hypothesis, also received a stay of execution after a dramatic series of events involving a Texas House Committee, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the Innocence Project, defense attorneys, the investigator on his case, physicians, and the Texas Supreme Court.
James Harris, Jr., was scheduled to be executed in March despite the fact he never had a mandatory federal habeas appeal. The Texas CCA sent his case to the trial court to hear whether Harris’s claim that the “jury selection process dramatically reduced the likelihood of Black potential jurors being called” in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
The report also looks at two wrongful convictions in which the courts determined “actual innocence” in the cases of Melissa Lucio and Kerry Max Cook. Lucio’s case is pending at the Texas CCA, which must decide whether to accept a trial court’s recommendation to overturn her conviction and death sentence. And Cook, who was first convicted 50 years ago, was officially exonerated by the Texas CCA.
###
