Embattled Federal Judge Called For Texas To Execute 8 To 12 Times As Many Inmates Per Year According to a complaint filed last week against federal appellate Judge Edith Jones, Jones suggested that African-Americans and Hispanics are predisposed towards violent crime and that the death penalty is a public service because it allows inmates to “make peace with God.” Should these allegations against Judge Jones be proven, they will be only the latest examples of a career’s worth of nonchalance regarding executions. Indeed, as far back as 1990, a much younger Jones proposed a series of reforms to Texas’ execution procedures that would have increased that state’s execution rate by as much as twelve times. In an article for the Texas Bar Journal entitled “Death Penalty Procedures: A Proposal for Reform,” which is available through the legal research service HeinOnline, Jones decries a capital punishment system in Texas which she views as too inefficient, in large part because judges delay executions by taking time to review death sentences to determine that they were lawfully handed down. Indeed, at one point Jones blames the slow rate of executions on “the frequent, human reaction of most judges . . . to defer a decision if any element of a case raises doubts, or to grant a temporary stay for further consideration.” To speed along Texas’ ability to kill death row inmates, Jones proposes that Texas schedule “four to six executions per month, commencing six months to one year from the date” those execution dates are made public. Notably, in the five years prior to when Jones wrote this piece, Texas executed an average of just under six inmates per year, so the immediate impact of her proposal would have been to multiply the state’s execution rate eight to twelvefold. It’s also worth noting that Texas’ execution rate did spike significantly in the years after Jones wrote this piece. Most significantly, during the four years after Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which limited the ability of death row inmates to challenge their sentences in federal court, Texas executed an average of 33 people per year. Nevertheless, in the modern era of American death penalty law, Texas has never executed the 48 to 72 people per year suggested by Jones’ piece. The deadliest year for Texas inmates was 2000, when 40 people were executed. 15 people were executed last year. Nevertheless, Jones concludes her list of proposals for expediting Texas’ executions by suggesting they could be viewed as “too lenient” because they would “take more than four years to conclude all the currently pending capital cases.” ***Read more
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 20:20:11 +0000
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