Bush Defends Streamlined Texas Death Penalty System

Gov. George W. Bush has helped to fine-tune a capital punishment system that sends inmates to their deaths more efficiently than any other in America and with what critics say are fewer safeguards.

He has vetoed a bill that would have allowed counties to set up a public defender system for indigent suspects and successfully pushed for legislation to streamline the state appeals process.

The presumed Republican presidential nominee has presided over more executions than any other governor in American history and has issued only one 30-day stay of execution in more than five years in office. That stay came 13 days ago, in the middle of a presidential campaign in which he is working to persuade voters of his centrist and compassionate vision.

And, as the Texas death penalty system is being scrutinized in federal court over questions of impropriety, unfairness and competence of counsel, Bush continues to defend it, insisting that all of the 132 men and women executed on his watch were guilty and received due process.

“I know there are some in the country who don’t care for the death penalty, but I’ve said once and I’ve said a lot that in every case we’ve adequately answered innocence or guilt,” Bush said Sunday in Kennebunkport, Maine, after attending church services near his family retreat. “They’ve had full access to the courts.”

Serious debate about how the death penalty is administered in America has begun to percolate for the first time in years--a newly nuanced discussion that is spilling over into Campaign 2000 and will likely dog Bush’s campaign from now until election day.

It has been fueled, in part, by questions of innocence raised by the growing use of DNA evidence and by a study released Monday that says the judicial system in this nation tramples on the rights of the accused in capital cases, and death sentences are reversed more than half the time in 90% of the states. In Texas, 52% of the death sentences that went through the full appeals process by the end of 1995 were reversed, the study said.

In the five months leading up to the November election, 19 more executions are scheduled in Texas. Thomas Wayne Mason, 48, was executed Monday for the shotgun murders of his estranged wife’s mother and grandmother. John Burks, 44, was scheduled to die today, although his execution has been thrown into doubt because of court action Tuesday. Paul Nuncio, 31, is set to die by injection Thursday.

A Deadly Year in Texas

If all of these scheduled executions take place, 2000 will be the busiest year in modern history for the Huntsville death chamber, and Bush will have presided over the deaths of 65 inmates from the time he announced his presidential exploratory committee on March 9, 1999, through the election.

“One of the reasons this story will have legs in the general election is we have an unprecedented number of executions scheduled,” said Richard Murray, a political scientist and director of the nonpartisan Center for Public Policy at the University of Houston. “We just haven’t had a governor running for president that had this as the backdrop of his campaign.”

Analysts contend that Bush’s stand on capital punishment alone will not likely affect the outcome of the November election. But it does speak to the question of Bush’s politics.

Democratic strategist Bill Carrick said that for many swing voters, the death penalty debate is a reminder “that George W. Bush is a conservative Southern governor . . . and is not moderate.”

Still, Bush’s support for the death penalty is in line with the majority of Americans. Of all 50 governors, only seven oppose capital punishment, whether it is the law in their state or not. Bush’s presumed Democratic rival for the White House, Vice President Al Gore, supports the death penalty too.

A Gallup Poll taken earlier this year showed that 66% of Americans supported capital punishment, down from a high of 80% in 1981. That same poll showed that, when given the alternative of life without the possibility of parole, support for the death penalty dropped to 52%. In addition, 91% of those polled believed that at least one innocent person had been sentenced to death in the last 20 years.

But there is a difference between supporting capital punishment for heinous crimes and being chief executive of a state where an inmate is executed every other week on average and where wardens come from around the country to learn lethal injection.

Texas Leads U.S. in Number of Executions

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Texas has led America in its embrace of executions. In this modern era, 219 inmates have been put to death here; Virginia is next, with 76 executions. Although California is the largest state in the nation and has the largest death row, the state has only executed eight men in the same period.

With nearly 20 million residents, Texas is the second-biggest state in America. In contrast, New York, which is third largest, hasn’t executed anyone in this modern era. In the five years that New York has had a death penalty, only five people have even received that stiffest of sentences. In the same period, Texas condemned some 200 convicts.

“Texas still has a kind of frontier justice mentality,” said Rudolfo de la Garza, professor of government at the University of Texas. Bush “reflects very clearly the dominant view of the state . . . . Opinion may be changing around him in other states. Opinion is not changing around him in Texas.”

By the time Bush was elected, the state had already committed itself to aggressive enforcement of the death penalty, said political scientist Murray. One indication: In 1993, the state created a capital litigation division to fight federal appeals and make sure death sentences are carried out.

“He saw no reason to change that policy [of aggressiveness] and marginally accelerated it,” Murray said.

Of the 38 states that have the death penalty, Texas is one of only four that does not offer juries the option of sentencing those convicted of capital crimes to life without the possibility of parole.

Texas is one of 26 states that executes the mentally retarded. It is one of 23 states that executes underage convicts. The minimum age to receive the death penalty in Texas is 17.

A year before Congress passed legislation to speed the federal appeals process, Bush signed a law that streamlined his state’s appeals process by having it take place at the same time as habeas corpus review.

Under habeas corpus review, the competence of counsel is examined. Until the law changed, such a review happened only after the outcome of the state appeal was known.

“You don’t know about inadequate representation or malpractice until you get to the end of the proceeding and look at it in its totality,” said James Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project. “He rendered habeas corpus in Texas worthless.”

Bush’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, successfully pushed for similar legislation, but the Florida Supreme Court rejected the law, charging that it violates inmates’ basic rights.

Questions Surround Defense Attorneys

George W. Bush also vetoed a bill last year that would have allowed counties to set up a public defender system, something akin to the one in California, for example, where every county appoints attorneys for those who cannot afford representation.

Critics argue that in Texas, defense lawyers for those charged with capital crimes are picked out of a pool of eligible attorneys by an administrative judge in charge of the court where the suspect will be tried. As a result, they say, such attorneys work as friends of the court, not defenders of the accused.

“The way Texas appoints its defense attorneys makes it very difficult to mount an effective defense at the trial level,” said Dennis Longmire, a political science professor at Sam Houston State University. “It undermines the integrity of that first adversarial step in the process.”

Bush vetoed the law, said his state spokesman Michael Jones, because he felt that it did not lead to better representation and that it “would have created a whole new layer of unnecessary bureaucracy which would have led to backlog.”

In addition, Jones said, the law would have taken “authority to appoint defense counsel away from trial judges and gave it to elected officials, many of whom have no trial experience and are not involved in the criminal justice system.”

To Harrington and other critics, people who face execution continue to receive incompetent counsel. And he pointed to two current Texas cases as evidence:

Calvin J. Burdine, whose attorneys argued in a federal appeals court last week that his murder conviction should be overturned because his original defense lawyer slept during his trial. And Victor Hugo Saldana, whose murder conviction was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court the same day, after his state prosecutors conceded that his death sentence stemmed in part from the fact that he is Latino.

Campaigning in Augusta, Ga., the day after the Saldana decision, Bush said that the Supreme Court action is proof that “the system is working . . . that there are safeguards.”

Bush says he supports the death penalty for those who commit heinous crimes because he believes it is a deterrent to future brutal offenses and saves lives. It is also the law of his land, he says.

“Of the many thousands of decisions a chief executive makes,” he wrote in his autobiography, “A Charge to Keep,” “capital punishment decisions are by far the most profound . . . . Each case is major, because each case is life or death.”

He also notes that the Texas governor does not exercise that much power over the death penalty process. Unlike many other governors, Bush may grant only one-time, 30-day stays of execution. He can commute sentences entirely with the approval of the state Pardons and Paroles Board. On the other hand, he appoints that board.

“We have lists of governors who execute the most, who seem to be enamored with the punishment,” said Anne James of Amnesty International USA’s Program to Abolish the Death Penalty. “He’s at the top of the list.”

North Dakota Gov. Edward T. Schafer, chairman of the Republican Governors Assn., would argue otherwise. Texas “probably is on the parameter edge of executing inmates, but I don’t think the governor is. I think he feels very strongly he has a responsibility to deliver the laws of the state.”

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Executions in Texas *

Since George W. Bush was sworn in as Texas governor on Jan. 17, 1995, he has presided over 132 executions. The first was the day of his inauguration; the most recent was Monday. The U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Texas resumed executing prisoners 1982.

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1995: 19*

1997: 37

2000: 19**

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* Texas executed one inmate on Jan. 4, 1995, before Bush’s inauguration.

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** Texas has scheduled 20 more executions for 2000. If all take place, this will be the busiest year ever in modern Texas death penalty history.

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Leading the Nation

The five states with the most executions since 1976, plus California, which ranks 16th.

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State Total 2000 1999 Texas 218 19 35 Virginia 76 3 14 Florida 46 2 1 Missouri 42 1 9 Louisiana 25 - 1 California 8 1 2

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Source: Texas Department of Criminal Justice