Texas Still Leads The Nation In Executions

We are finishing up the final few days of 2012, and that means it's time for the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty to release its annual report. And as usual, it shows that Texas still leads the nation by a long shot. Here are the executions done in the United States in 2012:

Texas...............15
Mississippi...............6
Oklahoma...............6
Arizona...............6
Ohio...............3
Florida...............3
South Dakota...............2
Indiana...............1
Delaware...............1
Total...............43

Note that Texas executed about 35% of all the people murdered by the state killing apparatus in the United States this year, and more than twice as many as any other state. Now don't get the idea that Texans think this is justice, or will prevent future capital crimes. They know better. They just don't care. This is all about revenge, and an unnatural taste for blood. If the state were to vote on whether to keep the death penalty or not, keeping it would win hands down.

But that may be changing. Killing only 15 inmates is a rather low number for Texas, nearly as low as last year's number of only 13. Here are the number of executions in Texas for the last six years:

2007...............26
2008...............18
2009...............24
2010...............17
2011...............13
2012...............15

But even though the executions seem to be slowing down, Texas still has not registered a year in which they killed less than one person a month, or even averaged only one person a month (although 2011 came close). There is a small bit of good news though -- Texas juries are not handing down death sentences as much as they used to (although even one is too many). This means it is likely that the number of executions may fall further in the future. We can only hope. Here are the numbers of death penalties for the last 11 years:

2002...............37
2003...............28
2004...............24
2005...............14
2006...............11
2007...............14
2008...............12
2009...............9
2010...............8
2011...............8
2012...............9

But while the number of death penalties seems to be dropping, that doesn't mean they are being passed out on a fairer basis. Texas would still rather kill a minority person than a white person, especially if that minority person is black. While African-Americans make up only 11.8% of the Texas population, they have made up about half of the people executed in the last five years (45.7%). Hispanics made up 28.3% and whites made up 26.1%.

While I am happy that the number of executions seems to be dwindling somewhat, I still don't really understand why the state has to execute anyone at all. Are there heinous criminals out there who deserve to never walk among us ever again? Of course. But giving them life without parole will effectively accomplish that. And if we later discover a mistake was made (they are innocent), they can be released -- but you can never take back killing an innocent person.

Frankly, as a Texan, I am ashamed that my home state still thinks it is OK to kill people to prove that killing people is wrong. That doesn't even make sense.