Report: Bexar County juries don’t like the death penalty

Juries are becoming more and more reluctant to hand out death sentences throughout Texas, but especially in Bexar County, according to a new report by the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

In 2017, juries in Texas sentenced four people to death — the lowest level since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state’s revised capital punishment statute in 1976.

Bexar County juries sentenced no one to death last year, the report states, and have sentenced only one person to death in the past eight years: Mark Anthony Gonzalez, who was convicted in the 2011 murder of a Bexar County sheriff’s sergeant.

Harris County, meanwhile, has sentenced 10 people to death in the past eight years.

“Texas continues to move away from the death penalty, even in the counties that have used it the most,” Kristin Houlé, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said in a news release.

“Prosecutors, juries, judges, and the public are subjecting our state’s death penalty practices to unprecedented scrutiny,” she added. “In an increasing number of cases, they are accepting alternatives to this flawed and irreversible punishment.”

Six counties — out of 254 counties in Texas — account for more than half of all new death sentences imposed in the past five years, the report found. Bexar County is not one of them.

The Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty, an advocacy organization based in Austin, said the decline can be credited to improvements in the quality of legal counsel and the exorbitant cost of death penalty trials.

Other reasons cited: Prosecutorial discretion, concerns about wrongful convictions and the availability of life in prison without the possibility of parole — which became a sentencing option in Texas in 2005.

Historically, Bexar County has been one of the counties to hand out the most death penalties. Since 1974, prosecutors in Bexar County have secured 76 death sentences, the third-most sentences statewide.

But in recent years, that trend has declined. Between 2009 and 2012, four juries that could have used capital punishment rejected the sentence. The defendants were sentenced to life in prison without parole instead.

The report also shows the application of the death penalty remains near historic lows.

Last year, Texas put seven people to death, matching 2016 for the lowest number of executions in two decades. Still, Texas accounted for 30 percent of all U.S. executions last year.

Two people from Bexar County were executed in 2017: Rolando Ruiz, a hit man who killed a woman on behalf of her husband and brother-in-law, and TaiChin Preyor, who killed a 24-year-old woman in a drug-related attack.

Bexar County matched Tarrant County for the most executions in the state. Harris County, in comparison, had zero executions — the first time that’s happened since 1985 — and Dallas County accounted for one execution.

However, the report noted that application of the death penalty remains racially biased. Over the past five years, 70 percent of death sentences have been imposed on people of color. More than half of those death sentences were handed to African-American defendants — even though African-Americans make up only 13 percent of the population.

Five executions already are scheduled for the first quarter of 2018, though none of them are from Bexar County.

On Nov. 28, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the execution of Juan Castillo to review claims of false testimony. His execution has not yet been rescheduled.