{"id":93893,"date":"2025-12-19T08:20:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T08:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/93893\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T08:20:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T08:20:07","slug":"texas-is-executing-fewer-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/93893\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas is executing fewer people"},"content":{"rendered":"

On many<\/a> occasions<\/a>, this editorial board has questioned the wisdom of giving the power of life and death to a government system that is plainly flawed. That\u2019s why we welcomed a report this month showing that Texas is taking that step less often.<\/p>\n

The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty\u2019s year in review shows a remarkable trend: a drastic curve-shaped decline in death penalties meted out in our state over the last quarter century. In 1999, Texas sentenced 48 people to death. This year, that number was three. <\/p>\n

The curve on that 26-year graph has a long tail, meaning the numbers have been low the last several years. <\/p>\n

Texas was once known as the capital of capital punishment. Thankfully, we can no longer claim that title. This year, Florida put 18 people to death \u2014 more than any other state. Texas executed only five. Two others were scheduled to die but received stays from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Alabama and South Carolina also executed five. <\/p>\n

Opinion<\/p>\n

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One of the five people executed in Texas this year was from Dallas County. The crime was gruesome, as so many crimes in these cases are. Matthew Johnson poured lighter fluid on a 79-year-old gas station attendant then set fire to her in Garland in 2012. Such crimes cry out for justice. But here we must harness our emotions.<\/p>\n

Some cases in the news recently illustrate the problems with this punishment. In the case of Robert Roberson, accused of shaking his 2-year-old daughter to death in 2002, new scientific evidence calls his guilt into question. In the case of Patrick Crusius, the killer in the 2019 El Paso Walmart shootings, families of the victims<\/a> agreed to drop the death penalty for a man already serving 90 life sentences.<\/p>\n

Criminals like Crusius and Johnson should never be allowed to reenter society. Their crimes are heinous, as are all the crimes that land people on death row.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also true that the system we use to assign the ultimate punishment is irreparably flawed. In November, the Texas Observer<\/a> reported that 201 death row sentences have been overturned in America since 1973. Eighteen of those were in Texas. We weren\u2019t just the capital of capital punishment; we\u2019ve been the capital of wrongful sentences.<\/p>\n

Governments at every level have a responsibility to protect citizens. That means getting violent people off the streets. But states shouldn\u2019t be in the business of death. Thankfully, Texas is slowly getting out of it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On many occasions, this editorial board has questioned the wisdom of giving the power of life and death…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2315,112,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-93893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-death-penalty","tag-editorials","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}