A clear trend

Amnesty International last week issued its annual report on the use of capital punishment, reporting that worldwide executions spiked by 54 percent, while the number of executions carried out in the United States continued to decline in 2015.

A total of 28 people were put to death in six states, the lowest number of executions recorded in the U.S. since 1991. Only three states - Texas, Missouri and Georgia - were responsible for 85 percent. The busiest executioner in 2015 was in Texas, where 13 men were put to death by lethal injection.

Nationally, these numbers are headed in the right direction, but Texas has been stubbornly resistant even as one example after another of botched justice has come to light.

The most recent high-profile example of our error-prone death penalty is the case of former death row inmate Alfred Dwayne Brown, who continues to battle the state of Texas for fair treatment after he was wrongfully convicted in the 2003 shooting death of Houston Police Officer Charles Clark. Brown, now 34, spent a decade of his incarceration on death row, but his conviction was overturned by an appeals court. The Harris County District Attorney's Office decided there was not enough credible evidence to try the case again, and the charges were dismissed. However, the state is refusing to award him just compensation for his ordeal.

Brown's case is not unique and sounds tragically familiar. A litany of Texas cases over the years has raised serious questions about whether defendants received justice in a Texas courtroom.

Well-known Texas exoneree Anthony Graves was released from prison in 2010 after 18 years, 16 of them on death row, in the 1992 deaths of six people in Sommerville. His case was riddled with false or misleading forensic evidence, perjury or false accusation and official misconduct. Twice the former Burleson County resident was given an execution date.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, Texas has had 241 exonerations between January 1989 and February. There are other cases where defendants may have been executed on the basis of questionable or false evidence.

State Reps. Harold Dutton and Jessica Farrar, both D-Houston, and state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville, last year filed separate bills to abolish the death penalty. Their goal may seem quixotic to some, given Texas lawmakers' dedication to the ultimate penalty, but we urge them to try again when the Legislature assembles for the next session in 2017.

Some things take time to change. For the end of the death penalty in Texas, that time is past due.