“Texas remained an unfortunate outlier as just one of five states to carry out executions in 2023, leading the nation with eight people put to death this year,” the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty stated in its annual report, “Texas Death Penalty Developments in 2023: The Year in Review.”
The report noted that the majority of the eight men killed by the state in 2023 had “significant intellectual or mental health impairments, including intellectual disability, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, brain damage, suicidal ideation, clinical depression, and other diagnoses of mental illness. And, disturbingly, “most of their jurors” never heard about these impairments, or the trauma the men experienced in their lives, according to TCADP.
“The death penalty remains geographically isolated within Texas, with more than half of the thirteen scheduled execution dates coming from just three counties: Dallas (three); Harris (two); and Bowie (two). Juries in just eleven Texas counties have imposed death sentences since 2019,” the report stated.
And, just as is the case in all death sentences in the U.S., racism pervades Texas’s system. “Juries imposed two of the three new death sentences on people of color, and five of the eight people put to death were Black, Hispanic, or Native American,” TCADP reported.
“Receiving a death sentence or being executed amounts to a ‘lethal lottery,’ one that does nothing to deter crime or promote public safety,” said Kristin Houlé Cuellar, TCADP Executive Director and author of the report.