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Houston accounts for one-third of Texas death row
The Battalion • Page 5
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HOUSTON (AP) — In Harris County,
which has earned the unofficial title of being
the nation’s death-penalty capital, blacks
have been sent to death row nearly twice as
often as whites during the last 10 years, ac
cording to a published report.
Some death penalty foes insist that
racism has driven this growing disparity,
but death penalty proponents argue that a
growing and increasingly violent underclass,
not bigotry, is to blame, the Houston Post
reported Sunday in a copyright story.
Harris County juries sentenced blacks
and whites to die in relatively even numbers
from 1975 through 1984, but they have con
demned 50 blacks and 26 whites since 1985.
“It saddens me,” says U.S. Rep. John
Lewis, D-Ga., a longtime civil rights activist.
“I thought we had come a distance much
further along. I think it represents a part of
our dark past.”
Since Texas resumed executions in 1976,
82 men have died by lethal injection in
Huntsville.
Of those, 33 have been from Harris Coun
ty, as many as Florida has executed since
resuming executions in its electric chair in
the mid-1970s. Only Texas, as a state, has
executed more convicts than Florida.
As of Oct. 5, 111 of the 392 inmates on
the Texas death row inmates were from
Harris County. Four more are on the way
from the county jail.
The state’s three other most populous
counties — Dallas, Tarrant and Bexar —
have a combined 77 inmates on death row.
There also are eight Hispanics on death
row from Harris County and three more on
the way from the county jail.
(The Houston Post said that while some
Hispanics are classified as white, they are
not included in any of the Sunday article’s
statistics. That ethnic group has not yet be
come part of the argument over racial dis
parities in death sentencing.)
The man who takes the most heat for
Texas Department of Criminal Justice rapidly
expanding, forced to hire less-experienced guards
HOUSTON (AP) — The Texas prison
system’s phenomenal growth over the past
three years, some prgue, has put younger
faces on the 18,000 men and women who
work as prison guards.
Therein lies one of the problems that led
to the recent beating death of an inmate,
said Carol Vance, chairman of the Texas
Board of Criminal Justice.
The fatal beating occurred after a recre
ation yard melee and other events of spo
radic violence at the Terrell Prison Unit
outside Livingston on Oct. 7.
Two guards have been charged with
murder in the death of Michael McCoy, 30,
who died after being stomped and kicked in
the head. Both guards started working for
the prison system earlier this year.
In the first eight months of this year,
the system hired 6,180 guards. An addi
tional 10,000 to 12,000 will be hired over
the next 12 to 14 months, said James A.
“Andy” Collins, executive director of the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Prison officials are uncertain how
many of those new guards meet the mini
mal requirements of a high school equiva
lency diploma — as opposed to college
graduates.
But officials said they are being forced
to hire younger and less-experienced peo
ple to staff new prisons, the Houston
Chronicle reported Sunday.
Collins said the rapid hiring means that
“a good portion of the guard staff doesn’t
have long tenure.”
TDCJ spokesman Glen Castlebury said
the agency does not compile figures on av
erage age or education levels of the people
they hire.
Officials have defended the image of
prison employees after the incidents at
Terrell.
But the problems there also prompted
renewed calls for more extensive training
of guards. Because of limited funds, howev
er, it is unlikely guards will get more time
in the classroom before they go on duty.
Harris County’s hang-’em-high reputation is
District Attorney John B. Holmes Jr., who
blames conduct, not color.
Holmes said he rarely knows the race of a
defendant or victim when deciding whether
to pursue the death penalty. But he said he
doubts that black defendants do not rate the
ultimate sentence in any greater proportion
than they kill.
Since 1984, blacks have been accused in
about half of Harris County’s homicides and
accounted for 54.8 percent of those sen
tenced to die, state crime figures show.
Mark Vinson, one of Holmes’ chief
prosecutors, believes the system is fair. Vin
son is black.
“I think it would be doing everybody an
injustice to say, ‘Hey, we should let this kid
get away because of his skin color.’ What
about the victims? I think it would only be
encouraging that kind of conduct,” he said.
But Stephen B. Bright, director of the
Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human
Rights, said he wonders how Holmes can
justify seeking death sentences for so
many prisoners when other Texas prosecu
tors do not.
Holmes responds that he took an oath to
uphold the statute and he’s doing it indis
criminately.
“We are a nation of laws, not a na
tion of men,” he said.
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