NCJ Number
153841
Date Published
1994
Length
34 pages
Annotation
The death penalty in Texas is in a state of crisis, and this has implications for the rest of the Nation.
Abstract
Numerous death penalty cases in Texas have been tainted by overzealous prosecutions and the use of perjured testimony. State-paid medical "experts" make unreliable predictions about defendants' future dangerousness, and other doctors lie about tests they never performed. Since 1987, six innocent people have been sentenced to death and later released. The race of the defendant and victim play a major part in which cases are selected for the death penalty. Legal representation of indigent defendants at trial is often incompetent, and representation for appeals is often nonexistent. The costs of the death penalty in Texas are in the hundreds of millions of dollars and continue to increase. During the period when Texas rose to become the Nation's leading death penalty State, its crime rate grew by 24 percent, and its violent crime increased by 46 percent, much faster than the national average. Many in America are pushing for a faster pace and a wider use of the death penalty on both the State and Federal levels. Texas is a paradigm of what can happen under such an expansion. 110 references