Points of Reference: Crime, Punishment and Politics

There is a lot of talk about the death penalty these days. On Saturday, demonstrations were held worldwide in the hope of saving the life of a man condemned to death in Georgia, a state in the southern United States. Troy Davis, a black man who is now 42 years old, has always proclaimed his innocence in the murder of a police officer in 1989, and several of the eyewitnesses who had accused him have recanted their testimonies. He has exhausted nearly all possible recourse, but at the moment of going to press, we learned that his lawyers have sent one final request to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to suspend his execution.

Another black American, sitting on death row for several years, is facing execution in the near future, and his case should also cause some chatter. Duane Edward Buck, 48, was convicted of shooting his former girlfriend and her lover in Texas in 1997. He was supposed to have been executed last Thursday, but at the last minute, the U.S. Supreme Court granted him a stay to give time to examine the validity of his sentence.

Unlike in the case of Troy Davis, Duane Buck’s guilt isn’t really questioned. The problem is the fact that a criminal psychologist claimed during the sentencing that black men are more inclined to violence than others and thus more likely to repeat an offense when they are eventually released from prison.

Texas leads in the race among states that have executed the most prisoners since the reestablishment of the death penalty in the U.S. in 1976. Its current governor, Rick Perry, is the champion in this regard, having taken the honors from his predecessor, George W. Bush. If the executioners inject him with the deadly poison, Duane Buck will be the 235th person to be executed since Rick Perry has been governor.

Rick Perry, a Republican like Mr. Bush, aspires to become the president of the world’s superpower. He currently leads in the polls, ahead of the moderate Mitt Romney and the tea party idol Michele Bachmann. Less than two weeks ago, during a public debate between the candidates for the Republican nomination, Mr. Perry was treated to applause for his performance in the execution of criminals.

Texas has killed 474 prisoners since 1976, when the death penalty was restored. Rick Perry has thus presided over half of these punishments.

The number of executions has tended to decline in the United States but not in Texas. Fortunately, juries there pronounce fewer and fewer death sentences, which should eventually reduce the number of executions.

Besides its large population, several factors help make Texas the leader in putting people to death in the United Sates. Its legal procedure ensures that criminal cases there are judged more quickly than elsewhere. The judges of the appellate courts are elected — in a region where the death penalty is supported by a good majority of the citizens. According to some lawyers, these judges could be less qualified than their counterparts in other states, which could explain the fact that they often refuse to publish their decisions. Other critics point the finger at the ineffectiveness of the lawyers appointed by the court to defend indigent defendants.

These factors, in addition to the eloquent statistics, have led many authors to believe that the Texan justice system perpetuates the tradition of lynchings that occurred in the Wild West of former days as well as in the Old South before the Civil Rights Movement. The Lone Star State finds itself on the border of these two worlds.