Texas once again led the nation in executions in 2023. A large proportion of the prisoners put to death suffered from some form of mental illness or cognitive disability.
Texas put eight people to death over the course of the past year, accounting for fully one-third of the nation's executions. It was one of only five states in the country to conduct executions. The other four were Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Alabama.
Kristin Houlé Cuellar leads the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, which just issued its annual report on death penalty developments in the state.
"Six of the eight men put to death in Texas in 2023 had significant intellectual or mental health impairments," Cuellar said, "and those included intellectual disability, brain damage, suicidal ideation, clinical depression, and other diagnoses of mental illness. In many cases, these impairments were exacerbated by years of neglect and abuse."
Cuellar said that, in several of those six death penalty trials, the jury was not presented with this potentially mitigating evidence by the lawyers representing the men.
"The appellate teams presented this mitigating evidence to some of the jurors in those trials and heard from them that they would have wanted to hear this mitigating evidence, and it might have even changed their verdict and how they voted for the death penalty, or at least they thought this merited further review," Cuellar said.
The report also finds that more people left Texas's death row over the past five years for reasons other than execution than were actually put to death by the state.
"Since 2019," Cuellar said, "we've had 31 people whose sentences were reduced or they died in custody from medical conditions versus 28 people who were put to death."
From Cuellar's perspective, this indicates the futility of maintaining the option of capital punishment. "The state invests untold time and energy and real dollars in, first of all, seeking a death sentence and then maintaining that death sentence over decades, and yet, in more cases than not, it's not actually leading to an execution."
The number of people being sent to Texas's death row has fallen sharply over the past two decades, in part because of the enactment of life in prison without parole as an alternative punishment.
"For the last nine years in a row, the number of new death sentences involving new cases in Texas has been in the single digits," Cuellar said. "This year, Texas juries sent three new individuals to death row. In two other cases in which prosecutors sought the death penalty, the juries rejected that. Instead, the defendants were sentenced to life without parole."
Harris County continues to lead the state in terms of the number of people sentenced to die, although that too is falling. The county has only issued three new death sentences over the past five years.
"Harris County has sentenced nearly 300 people to death (since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a nationwide ban on capital punishment). Of those, around 133 have been executed, so that's more than any state except Texas itself," Cuellar said.
The one death sentence the county issued this year was in the case of Darryl Wheatfall, who was originally sentenced to die in 1992 for the murders of James and L.B. Fitzgerald. In 2015, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his death sentence in 2015 and sent the case back to Harris County. "Instead of waiving the death penalty as they have done in many, many other cases that have been sent back to the county," Cuellar said, "Harris County prosecutors sought another death sentence for Mr. Wheatfall, and the jury did sentence him to death again."
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