Texas ranked second in executions carried out in 2024, behind Alabama

From Houston Public Media:

Texas ranked second in the nation for the number of executions carried out in 2024. This year’s annual report from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP) found the state skewed heavily towards people of color, both in terms of those executed and those newly sentenced to die.

“Alabama led all states with six executions,” said TCADP executive director Kristin Houlé Cuellar, “but for the last-minute intervention by state and federal courts in the cases of Robert Roberson and Ruben Gutierrez, Texas very well could have led the nation in executions once again this year.”

Of the five executions Texas carried out this year, three came from death sentences handed down in the Greater Houston area. Those included Garcia White and Arthur Burton from Harris County and Travis Mullis, a Brazoria County man sentenced in Galveston County.

Harris County led the state in terms of the number of executions this year with two, while Tarrant County led in terms of the number of new death sentences with three.

“Of the five people put to death by the state this year, four were people of color, and of the six people sentenced to death by juries, five of them are people of color,” Cuellar said, “This raises real concerns about the continued racial bias in the administration of the death penalty.”

The report indicated this has been a trend over time. Over the past five years, juries in Texas have handed down 16 new death sentences, 11 to people of color and five to whites. The trend has been even more pronounced in the countries that make the greatest use of the death penalty.

“Twenty-one of the last twenty-two defendants sentenced to death in Harris County are people of color: sixteen are Black; four are Hispanic; and one is another non-white race/ethnicity,” the report said. “In 2019, Ronald Haskell was the first white defendant in Harris County to receive a death sentence since November 2004.”

The report noted that all six men sentenced to death in Tarrant County since 2013 are people of color. Over the same period, Tarrant County prosecutors unsuccessfully sought the death penalty in five additional cases involving Black or Hispanic defendants. Juries rejected death sentences in three of these cases, while two other cases were declared mistrials due to the pandemic and were ultimately resolved with sentences of life in prison without parole.

According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Black individuals constitute 46.6% of death row inmates, even though they represent just 13.6% of Texas residents. By contrast, whites make up 25.3% of the death row inmates, compared to 39.6% of the general population. Hispanics make up 26.4% of the individuals on death row and 39.8% of the general population of Texas.

The six new death sentences handed down by Texas juries this year were double the number handed down last year. Still, the long-term trend is of decline.

“Death sentences peaked in this state in 1999, when juries sent 48 people to death row,” Cuellar said. “For the last decade, death sentences have remained in the single digits every year.”

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