A new report from Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project identifies America’s five deadliest head prosecutors out of the thousands that have held that office in the last 40 years. It specifically names Johnny Holmes, who served as the District Attorney of Harris County, Texas from 1979 to 2000; during his tenure, his office secured at least 200 death sentences. Since 2008, by contrast, Harris County juries have sent an average of one person to death row each year.
Month: June 2016
Today, June 29, marks the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman vs. Georgia (1972), which overturned all existing death penalty laws in effect at the time. In Furman, the Justices […]
On Thursday, June 16, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) granted a stay of execution to Robert Roberson, who was scheduled to be put to death Tuesday, June 21 […]
A jury in Bell County recently deadlocked in its deliberations on whether to sentence David Risner to death for the 2014 murder of Little River-Academy Police Chief Lee Dixon. Risner, a former police officer, was convicted of capital murder on June 6, 2016. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
At their 2016 gatherings, the Rio Texas, Central Texas, and Northwest Texas Annual Conferences of the United Methodist Church passed resolutions in support of abolition of the death penalty. All five United Methodist Conferences in Texas have now taken a stand on this issue.
The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a bi-partisan coalition of 40 prominent Latino organizations, has endorsed abolition of the death penalty. According to Juan Cartagena, co-chair of the NHLA Civil Rights committee and president of LatinoJustice, “The racialized aspects of the imposition of the death penalty in the United States could not just be overlooked, and that became the unifying piece.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear two Texas death penalty cases: one involving egregious racial bias (Buck v. Stephens) and the other addressing our state’s unscientific and outdated process for assessing intellectual disabilities in capital cases (Moore v. Texas). The case of Bobby James Moore raises the question of whether modern standards should be used in determining whether he is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty.
Today, in an astounding turn of events, prosecutors in Smith County dropped capital murder charges against Kerry Max Cook, in light of new evidence that severely undermined their case against him. Cook spent 20 years on death row in Texas.