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Nationwide, and particularly in Texas, anti-death penalty sentiment has usually been centered on college campuses and within the Catholic Church, Hirschorn says, but is expanding beyond those communities - a trend he sees reflected in his jury questionnaires as well as in nationwide political polls...
...number of people sentenced to death has been falling nationally since a peak of about 300 a year in the 1990s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, to 115 people in 2007. The reduction comes as more states, such as New York, New Jersey and Illinois have passed death penalty moratoriums; while some, like Maryland, are considering whether to abolish executions altogether...
...Texas still accounts for 50% of the executions in the U.S., and with an appeal process of 10 years (the shortest among the states), the numbers are unlikely to decrease significantly. According to Kristin Houle, director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the state averaged nearly one lethal injection per week over a five month period in 2008. There have been 423 executions in Texas since the state reininstituted the death penalty in 1982, and 374 condemned men and women are currently residing on Texas' Death Row. (One resident, Michael Blair, walked off death row this year...
...number of new residents appears to be slowing. "[In 2008] officials' zeal for executions was not matched by public desire for new death sentences, as evidenced by the continued steep decline in the number of new inmates arriving on death row," Houle says. Nowhere was that more apparent than in Houston, a city dubbed the "capital of capital punishment" in a study by the NAACP. After years of being a major contributor to Texas death row numbers, thanks in part to high profile "tough-on-crime" prosecutors, Houston juries sent no new prisoners to death row in 2008. The Harris...
...killers, baby killers are poster children for the death penalty," Hirschorn says, "and without the option of LWOP you could guarantee the death penalty." In the Houston cop killing case, the lawyers for defendant Juan Quintero initially attempted an insanity defense, citing a traumatic brain injury. Though the jurors rejected it and found Quintero guilty, Mark Bennett, a Houston defense lawyer argued on his blog "Defendingpeople.com" that the head injury testimony lingered in the minds of some jurors, who may have regarded it as a mitigating factor in deciding on a life sentence rather than execution...