This past week, even as Amnesty International released its annual report claiming progress towards abolition of the death penalty in all regions of the world, Texas executed a convict who had shot a man and raped his fiancée during a home break-in back in 1990. Rickey lynn lewis, 50, was the second Texan to be administered a lethal dose of pentobarbital injection.
For decades, Texas has led America’s table on enforcing capital punishment. So it will be in the coming months. At least 11 more people in the death row are scheduled to be executed on different dates between now and the end of July. last year, 43 persons from the death row were executed across the United States, 15 of them in Texas alone. The preceding year, too, 43 executions had taken place, with 13 in Texas.
Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated with the US Supreme Court holding it constitutional by reversing a ruling to the contrary four years earlier, there have been 1,327 executions to date across America. And Texas has accounted for as many as 494 of them, followed by Virginia with 110 and Oklahoma with 103. led by Texas, the southern states as a whole have accounted for 1,016 of these executions over the past three and a half decades.
In contrast to these predominantly conservative States, the liberal ones have had very few executions since 1976. While there has not been a single execution in New York, a State which has effectively abolished the death penalty, the other two major liberal States of California and Illinois have had only 13 and 12 executions during the period. Illinois, too, abolished the death penalty in 2011. Right now, 18 of the US’ 50 States and the District of Columbia do not have an enforceable death penalty statute.
Overall, the number of executions may be gradually dropping in the US, but it has as many as 3,146 convicts in death rows across the country. And here, the table is led by the liberal California, which has 724 death row inmates, followed by Florida with 411 and Texas with 304.
The Amnesty report puts the US at No 5 on its table of countries carrying out the death sentence, after China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The United States is the only country in the whole of North and South America to have carried out an execution last year, says Brian Evans, interim director of the Death Penalty Abolition Campaign for Amnesty International USA.
He points out that three quarters of all executions in the US during 2012 occurred in only four states: Texas, Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma. Texas’ 15 executions during the year, according to Evans, should put the State in the 8th place between Sudan and Afghanistan.
Given the sharp ideological polarisation, Americans are a divided lot over the death penalty. While 18 of the 50 States may have come out against capital punishment over a period of time, a Gallup poll released in January found that 63 per cent of Americans still favour its continuance for dealing with murder cases.
The level of support may have diminished steadily since 1994, when as many as 80 per cent were in favour, but in recent years, the number has plateaued around 60 per cent.
It is believed that the mass shooting rampages in recent times such as the Connecticut school massacre may well have influenced the majority view in favour of retaining the death penalty. Save for ‘liberals’, most demographic and political groups are said to broadly support the death penalty as punishment for murder.
With the conservative Texas moving closer to its 500th execution since the 1976 revival of the death penalty, the opponents of capital punishment are focusing on this ‘lone Star State’.
“We urge everyone in Texas and our friends worldwide to take action leading up to the 500th execution to let Texas know that it should stop executions with a moratorium and begin the process of repealing the death penalty,” says the Texas Death Penalty Education and Resource Centre, a Statewide coalition working for the repeal.
Texas Governor Rick Perry, however, remains a strong supporter of capital punishment. As a presidential hopeful for the 2012 race, Perry had during the Republican primaries brushed aside sharp criticism over his position on the death penalty, commenting at the time: “I think Americans understand justice. I think Americans are clearly, in the vast majority of cases, supportive of capital punishment.”