Death penalty

"The machinery of death" is how Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun referred to capital punishment. It aptly describes the systemized manner by which the government imposes the ultimate punishment. While states across our nation and countries across the globe have shuttered their own fatal institutions, Texas continues to churn on even as the gears of the criminal justice system buckle under moral weight and the people charged with overseeing the process call for a halt.

We heard that call earlier this month from state Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, a supporter of the death penalty and member of the last session's House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, when he fought to change the sentence for Jeffrey Wood from death to life in prison.

Wood was convicted of murder under Texas' felony murder statute, also known as the law of parties, which holds people responsible for deaths that result from crimes they commit. He was the get-away driver for a robbery that ended in the fatal shooting of gas station clerk Kris Lee Keeran in 1996. The man who pulled the trigger was executed in 2002. Wood remains on death row, even though he never set foot inside the store. Wood deserves a proportional punishment for his role in the crime, but it is hard to imagine that he has the extreme culpability that makes a criminal deserving of execution.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed Wood's execution earlier this month following claims that his case was tainted by the junk science of discredited psychiatrist, Dr. James Grigson.

However, in her concurrence and dissent, Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Elsa Alcala argued that Texas' highest criminal court should go further and authorize the trial court to address the underlying constitutionality of the death penalty itself. It was the second time since June that the former prosecutor and trial judge called for Texas courts to take up that charge. Among the arguments that our courts need to hear:

The death penalty in Texas is unconstitutionally arbitrary - race, and not the crime, is a better predictor of who receives capital punishment.

The death penalty in Texas is unconstitutionally cruel - a clogged system of appeals and delays can have defendants spending decades in a setting that is essentially solitary confinement. Most people on Texas death row have been there for more than 10 years, and 20 percent have been there for two decades or more.

The death penalty in Texas is unconstitutionally unusual - growing societal disapproval has rendered the punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court already banned executing juvenile defendants and the mentally disabled based on the rationale of evolving social norms. In fact, since 2010, changing standards of justice have isolated the death penalty to only 16 counties out of more than 3,000 across the United States.

It is a system that also even targets the innocent. Anthony Graves was lucky enough to be exonerated before the state took his life. Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 amid investigations into questionable evidence, wasn't so fortunate.

Former Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Tom Price called the state to look at this risk of executing the innocent.

"I am among a very few number of people who have had a front row seat to this process for the past four decades," he wrote in 2014. "Based on my specialized knowledge of this process, I now conclude that the death penalty as a form of punishment should be abolished."

The front-line perspectives of Judges Alcala and Price were backed by a recent study from Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project titled "Too Broken to Fix." As Chronicle reporter Brian Rodgers wrote Saturday, the study found that Harris County's criminal justice system is hounded by poor representation for indigent defendants in death penalty cases, overly aggressive prosecution and racial bias, resulting in convictions of innocent people.

These problems with our death penalty are obvious to the people of Harris County. Only 27 percent of residents would choose to impose death over life without parole, according to the Kinder Houston Area Survey. The problems also must be apparent to the prosecutors in our courtrooms - the number of death sentences has declined from 53 in 1998-2003 to 10 since 2010.

Yet District Attorney Devon Anderson continues to defend a broken system. She bills herself as a reformer, yet we see nothing happening in her office to ensure that people facing the ultimate punishment have equal access to justice. Instead, Harris County has to rely on dissenting opinions by statewide judges and a study out of Harvard to shine a light on the fatal deficiencies in our courts.

If this broken system is to be run by elected judges and a district attorney's office that have to answer to the political whims of party primaries and the general election, then we should at least ensure that mistakes will not be fatal - especially when we have the alternative of life without parole. We call on Anderson and her challenger, Kim Ogg, to finally bring our courts in line with the rest of Western Civilization. It is time to formally shut down the machinery of death and remove it from the Harris County Criminal Justice Center.