Texas goes against national trend on executions

Texas goes against national trend on executions

By Michael Graczyk, Associated Press

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — The convicted killer of a 3-year-old boy is set to die this week, the first of five lethal injections scheduled this month as Texas bucks a national trend and bolsters its standing as the most active in carrying out capital punishment.

Twenty-four condemned Texas killers were executed in 2006, accounting for 55% of all the executions in the United States. While the national count of 53 was seven fewer than 2005, the Texas total was up five from the previous year.

At least 11 are on the schedule already early this year, beginning with Carlos Granados, set to die Wednesday for the 1998 stabbing of a Williamson County boy, Anthony O'Brien Jimenez. The boy was killed during a domestic dispute in which Katherine Jimenez, Granados' girlfriend and the child's mother, suffered nearly two dozen stab wounds.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month refused to review Granados' case and his attorneys appealed to Gov. Rick Perry for clemency in a last-ditch effort to spare the 36-year-old New York City man's life.

Of the 38 states that allow capital punishment, only 14 carried out executions last year and just six of them conducted more than one.

Unlike Texas, where 379 inmates have been put to death since executions resumed in 1982, executions are on hold in at least 10 states where death penalty laws are under review, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based organization that opposes capital punishment and tracks the issue.

Two of those states, Illinois and New Jersey, have a formal moratorium. In the eight others — Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio and South Dakota — the lethal injection process is being challenged as cruel. Executions in New York are in limbo after the state's death penalty law in 2004 was declared unconstitutional.

NATIONAL TREND: Executions decline

Granados' punishment would begin a series of five lethal injections over 20 days in Texas, site of the nation's first lethal injection in 1982.

The four to follow this month include Johnathan Moore, convicted of killing a San Antonio police officer, and Ronald Chambers, a Dallas man who has been on death row some 31 years, longer than any of his fellow inmates in Texas and one of the longest-serving condemned inmates in the country.

A woman has an execution date in April. Cathy Henderson would be the fourth female inmate executed in Texas if her punishment is carried out in April.

The 24 executions last year in Texas was about average for the past decade, ranging between 17 in 2001 to 40 in 2000. However, Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, noted death sentences are down throughout the country, including Texas, partly because new sentencing laws allow jurors in capital cases the option of imposing life in prison without possibility of parole.

"To some extent Texas is changing," Dieter said. "Life without parole will accelerate that and will allow juries and prosecutors more options.

"I foresee death sentences will be lower than they have been, but there's a gap between sentencing and executions and it'll be some time before I think we'll see a decline in executions."

The state's "political commitment to the death penalty" also ensures any change in Texas will be slow, Dieter said.

"As evidenced in the courts, the legislature, the governor, all the procedures, the steps the death penalty has to go through, are supported on those levels in Texas," he said.

Gov. Rick Perry refused calls by legislators and others to halt executions when the Houston police crime lab was under investigation for shoddy DNA and ballistics analysis and several inmates — who were not on death row — were released from prison. Harris County, which includes Houston, sends more inmates to death row than any other county in Texas.

Rob Keppel, executive director of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, said there's not enough case data to determine the impact of the life-without-parole law, which took effect Sept. 1, 2005.

"There have been cycles in executions and there have been cycles in death penalty verdicts in the past. Maybe we better just wait and see," Keppel said.

The life-without-parole option didn't apply to Granados or any of those Texas prisoners now with execution dates.

Moore, 32, faces execution Jan. 17 for shooting Fabian Dominguez, a San Antonio police officer who confronted Moore and two companions during a burglary in January 1995.

On Jan. 24, Larry Swearingen, 35, is set to die for the December 1998 abduction and strangling of a 19-year-old Montgomery County woman, Melissa Trotter.

Chambers, 51, is to follow Swearingen to the death chamber the following day for abducting and fatally shooting Mike McMahan, 22, a Texas Tech student from Washington state, during an April 1975 carjacking in Dallas.

The fifth inmate scheduled to die in January is Christopher Swift, 31, condemned for beating and strangling his eight-months-pregnant wife, Amy, 27, in a recreational vehicle at an RV park in Irving, and strangling her mother, Sandra Sabeh, 61, the same day in April 2003 at her Lake Dallas home. Swift is volunteering to die Jan. 30.

At least two inmates have execution dates in February, three in March and one — Henderson — in April.

Henderson was convicted of causing head wounds that killed Brandon Baugh, a 3-month-old child she was baby-sitting at her home outside Austin.