Texas death sentences plummeted during Bush, Perry tenures

The number of Texas executions may draw cheers for Rick Perry on the campaign trail, and certainly it's been a big applause line for the governor that, "in the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you're involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is, you will be executed." That's tough talk, but is it true? At Courtex, Office of Court Administration chief Carl Reynolds says that "imposition of the death penalty has gone down fairly dramatically in recent years," and yesterday published this remarkable chart to prove it:

Carl adds, "one thing I find interesting about this graph is the fact that life without parole was not adopted until 2005 (S.B. 60 by Lucio), but the downward trend was well established well before then." I agree, and that's one reason Grits opposed the 2005 LWOP law, believing that death-penalty abolitionists were throwing their clients under the bus in deference to ideology by eschewing the "capital life" option. In the future, as the use of LWOP broadens (it's already been extended to certain non-capital cases) and geriatric healthcare costs continue to skyrocket, IMO that decision will increasingly appear foolish and ill-advised, contributing to the Californication of Texas justice. (About 6% of Texas prison inmates are lifers, compared to 20% in California.)

Other charts at Courtex demonstrate a similar drop in new death sentences in Harris County, which is responsible for 106 of 308 offenders on death row, Reynolds reports.

MORE: A prison-guard commenter at TexasJutsice.org agrees with criticism of the LWOP law for a different reason: "because they have no incentive to behave. Look at the last Polunsky escape attempt. All LWOP."