No Executions in the ​“Capital of Capital Punishment” for First Time in 30 Years

Harris County (Houston), Texas, has exe­cut­ed 126 pris­on­ers since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Texas’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment statute in 1976, more than any oth­er coun­ty in the United States and, apart from the rest of Texas, more than any state. But in 2017, no one will be sen­tenced to death in Harris County and, for the first time since 1985, no one sen­tenced to death in the coun­ty will be executed. 

In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court also over­turned two con­tro­ver­sial Harris County death-penal­ty cas­es, result­ing in agree­ments with coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors that Duane Buck and Bobby Moore should be resen­tenced to life. District Attorney Kim Ogg (pic­tured), elect­ed in 2016 as a reform pros­e­cu­tor, said she views these devel­op­ments ​“as a pos­i­tive thing.” ​“I don’t think that being the death penal­ty cap­i­tal of America is a sell­ing point for Harris County,” she said. 

Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham told the Houston Chronicle that, because of its pro­lif­ic exe­cu­tion rates, ​“Harris County has always sym­bol­ized America’s death penal­ty.” This year’s sta­tis­tics, he said, are ​“both sym­bol­ic and emblem­at­ic of the change in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States. For the first time in a gen­er­a­tion, the nation’s largest exe­cu­tion­er has exe­cut­ed no one.” 

Texas death-row exoneree Anthony Graves cred­it­ed the Ogg admin­is­tra­tion ​“for being out front on crim­i­nal jus­tice reform.… Because this is what it is, this is what it looks like,” he said. 

Texas’s sev­en exe­cu­tions in 2017 are still more than were car­ried out in any oth­er state, but a major­i­ty of the death war­rants issued dur­ing the year did not result in exe­cu­tions.

Death-penal­ty pro­po­nent Dudley Sharp attrib­uted the exe­cu­tion decline to the increase in time between sen­tenc­ing and exe­cu­tion. In Texas, how­ev­er, much of that increase is a result of changes in state law aris­ing from leg­isla­tive con­cerns about wrong­ful con­vic­tions: the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals grant­ed sev­en stays of exe­cu­tion in 2017 per­mit pris­on­ers to lit­i­gate claims that their con­vic­tions or death sen­tences were the prod­uct of defec­tive foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny, false evi­dence, or the sup­pres­sion of excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence by pros­e­cu­tors or vio­lat­ed this year’s Supreme Court deci­sion in Moore v. Texas. The sev­en exe­cu­tions statewide stood in stark con­trast to the 40 exe­cu­tions the state car­ried out in 2000. 

Declining mur­der rates, the avail­abil­i­ty of life with­out parole as a sen­tenc­ing alter­na­tive, and reduced pub­lic sup­port for the death penal­ty have all con­tributed to the reduc­tion of new death sen­tences in Harris County. A 2016 report by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University found that the num­ber of Houston-area res­i­dents pre­fer­ring the death penal­ty over life sen­tences for those con­vict­ed of first-degree mur­der had fall­en to just 27%.