In terms of the number of executions performed in 2024, Texas came in second place nationwide. The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP) released its annual report this year, which revealed that the state disproportionately disproportionately executed and newly sentenced individuals of color.
“Alabama led all states with six executions,” said Kristin Houl Cuellar, executive director of the T “but for the last-minute intervention by state and federal courts in the cases ofRobert RobersonandRuben Gutierrez, Texas very well could have led the nation in executions once again this year.”
Three of Texas’ five executions this year were from death sentences given in the Greater Houston area. Among them were Travis Mullis, a Brazoria County man convicted in Galveston County, and Garcia White and Arthur Burton from Harris County.
This year, Harris County had the most executions in the state with two, while Tarrant County had the most new death sentences with three.
“Of the five people put to death by the state this year, four were people of color, and of the six people sentenced to death by juries, five of them are people of color,” stated Cuellar. “This raises real concerns about the continued racial bias in the administration of the death penalty.”
According to the research, this has been a pattern over time. Eleven death sentences for people of color and five for white individuals have been handed down by Texas juries in the last five years. In the nations that use the death sentence the most, the tendency has been even more noticeable.
“Twenty-one of the last twenty-two defendants sentenced to death in Harris County are people of color: sixteen are Black; four are Hispanic; and one is another non-white race/ethnicity,” stated the report. “In 2019, Ronald Haskell was the first white defendant in Harris County to receive a death sentence since November 2004.”
According to the research, all six of the men who have received death sentences in Tarrant County since 2013 are people of color. Five other cases involving Black or Hispanic defendants were unsuccessfully pursued by Tarrant County prosecutors for the death penalty during the same time period. In three of these cases, juries rejected death sentences; in the other two, the pandemic-related mistrials resulted in life sentences without the possibility of release.
Despite making up only 13.6% of the population of Texas, Black people make up 46.6% of death row inmates, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In comparison, white people make up 39.6% of the general population and 25.3% of death row inmates. Hispanics comprise 39.8% of Texas’s total population and 26.4% of those on death row.
Texas juries imposed twice as many new death sentences this year as they did the previous year. However, the long-term tendency is downward.
“Death sentences peaked in this state in 1999, when juries sent 48 people to death row,” said Cuellar. “For the last decade, death sentences have remained in the single digits every year.”
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