Harris County juries sentenced Mabry Landor III to death row this week in the fatal shooting of Houston Police officer Timothy Abernethy. Jurors deemed Landor as posing a future threat to society and thus opted for a death sentence.
Landor’s capital punishment sentence is the third this year in Texas and the first death sentence to be issued by Harris County jurors since 2007. Harris County, once known as the “death penalty capital of the world” has seen a sharp decline in the number of new death row sentences, in accordance with declining trends across the state of Texas.
A report issued by the American Civil Liberties Union in California, available here, labeled Los Angeles County as the new “death row capital”, sentencing more individuals to death row than the entire state of Texas last year.