Texas Death Penalty Still Raises Questions

In the decade since Texas resumed the death penalty, the state has been the most active in carrying out executions, and what outraged many at first has come to seem almost routine.

A condemned man’s fellow inmates no longer request TVs and radios be turned off or hold prayer vigils on execution nights. A lone man with candles staged a quiet vigil outside prison headquarters during an execution last month--a far cry from the hundreds of demonstrators 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, there are 367 inmates waiting to be put to death. The number is growing so fast that prison officials are considering adding a second Death Row at a new prison near Livingston.

And questions remain whether capital punishment provides any deterrent to crime.

“Is there one person out there who can sleep safer at night, or work in a 7-Eleven store at night, or one person who now sleeps without a door locked at night because of the death penalty?” asks Jim Beathard, who has been on Death Row for eight years. “The death penalty is revenge but not a satisfying one.”

On Dec. 7, 1982, Charlie Brooks was put to death by injection for killing a mechanic at a Ft. Worth used car lot.

“There were a lot of media and a lot of spectators, both pro and con,” recalls Charles Brown, an assistant director of the prison system who has seen virtually every execution in the state. “We were overwhelmed by the crowd.” Since then, Texas has executed 53 people, 11 this year alone. Bringing each one to the death chamber costs taxpayers an estimated $2.3 million.

The national execution count is approaching 200 since the 1976 Supreme Court ruling allowing states to resume use of the death penalty.

Yet many Texas inmates say they were unaware of the death penalty until their own case went to court.

And they are nearly unanimous in their sentiment that capital punishment is no deterrent to crime, although polls repeatedly have shown public support for it.

Since the Brooks case, Texas’ capital punishment law has undergone a decade of review by the highest courts of the land, making it more likely the punishment actually will be carried out.

“Things have gotten a little easier as time has gone by because the courts have gotten comfortable dealing with the death penalty issue,” says Bill Zapalac, one of seven assistant attorneys general who handle Texas death penalty cases. Four of them work at it full time.

But important questions remain.

The Supreme Court is considering now the case of Texas inmate Gary Graham, whose appeal could affect dozens of other death row inmates in the state.

Graham’s attorneys are arguing that a jury which sentenced him to death should have been allowed to consider his age at the time of his crime--he was 17--and his troubled family history.

“There’s always something that happens in any case that you can point to and say this was wrong,” Zapalac says.

But he thinks the law as it exists now “provides for everything the defendant is entitled to.”

In 1991, 29 inmates arrived on Death Row and five inmates died. This year, more than 30 people have been sentenced to death.

A high court ruling in the state’s favor in Graham’s case would put about three dozen inmates closer to actual execution, state officials said.

Although that frightens inmates on Death Row, they also say they believe a steady stream of convicts into the death chamber would prompt renewed and loud cries to abolish the penalty.