It is more deferential to the popular will. Some have speculated that the Texas execution rate also reflects a heritage of frontier justice coupled with modern urban crime. However, James W. Sorensen offer a more complex thesis.
In other words, the South has a cultural tradition of dehumanizing certain groups of people, which has made it easier for Southerners to separate themselves from those who do not adhere to the normal social and in this case, legal code. Lynching, in their interpretation, did not represent justice but rather the clearest way to exclude someone or, implicitly, a whole group from society. A member of a society who breaks the law experiences the force of justice; the representative individual who is forcibly rejected by, or excluded from, society is lynched.
Based on this understanding of lynching, their findings are compelling: there is a direct, inverse relationship between executions and lynchings over the course of the twentieth century. How could the coldly bureaucratic and legalistic execution serve the same socio-cultural purpose as the heated, violent and carnival-like lynching? The end of the Civil War undermined the disenfranchisement of blacks that had characterized the ante-bellum South.
Lynchings had been a tool white Southerners used to combat their insecurity about the status of blacks. Of course, Texas now executes a far wider racial and ethnic mix of individuals than African-Americans. How, then, could it be that Texans and Southerners in general continue to approach society in such a provincial and exclusivist way?
Indeed, the authors recognize that we can no longer simply regard the Southern predisposition toward the death penalty as a continuation of the ideals of the Confederacy.
And, needless to say, that cultural struggle will continue for the foreseeable future. This law sets significant time constraints on applications of habeas appeals, and it limits the number of appeals a defendant can make. Austin: University of Texas Press, Wrongful Convictions and Executions.
Since , individuals who spent time on death row have been exonerated. This includes 16 people convicted and sentenced to death in Texas, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Cost of the Death Penalty. National and International Abolition. A total of 23 states and the District of Columbia do not allow the death penalty. Governors in three other states Oregon, Pennsylvania, and California have imposed a moratorium on executions, bringing the total number of states that have either ended the death penalty or have a moratorium to Close Menu Home.
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Texas Death Penalty Facts. Charles Reynolds Red River County was executed. One of the most notorious inmates to be executed was Raymond Hamilton, a member of the "Bonnie and Clyde" gang. He was sentenced by Walker County and executed on May 10, , for murder. Hamilton and another man had escaped from death row, only to be captured and returned to death row.
When capital punishment was declared "cruel and unusual punishment" by the U. Supreme Court on June 29, , there were 45 men on death row in Texas and seven in county jails with a death sentence. All these sentences were commuted to life sentences by the governor of Texas, and death row was clear by March In , revision to the Texas Penal Code once again allowed assessment of the death penalty and allowed for executions to resume effective January 1, Under the new statute, the first man John Devries was placed on death row on February 15, Devries committed suicide July 1, , by hanging himself with bed sheets.
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