Texas Cancels Execution of Condemned Man

His defenders were down to their last resort. Robert Campbell, 41, was to be executed by lethal injection on the evening of Tuesday, May 13, at a prison in Huntsville, Texas. But the execution was postponed at the last minute by a federal court. Campbell’s lawyers argued that Campbell risked suffering the same fate as Clayton Lockett, whose execution on April 29 in Oklahoma was transformed into a long and terrible agony.

This latest debate over the death penalty in the United States is the result of a recent situation: States that continue to practice capital punishment are experiencing increasing difficulties in sourcing lethal products, because EU laboratories, influenced by groups hostile to the death penalty, are refusing to furnish them. Their American counterparts, exposed to this same hostility, are also increasingly reticent to provide supplies. The prison services in these states refuse to disclose either the identities of their suppliers or the formula substitutes they use.

Texas, the Death Penalty Capital

Robert Campbell received the death penalty for the 1991 murder and rape of Alexandra Rendon, a 20-year-old bank employee. On Tuesday, he was slated to be the eighth inmate executed in Texas since the beginning of 2014.

But his lawyers brought up the precedent created by the botched execution in Oklahoma, questioned the “safety” of the product used, and demanded the release of its composition. A state prosecutor responded that the risk of severe suffering was far from certain and that the Texas Constitution “does not require the elimination of all risk of pain.” Another counterargument: The protocol used in Texas is vastly different from that used in Oklahoma.

In addition, the condemned man’s attorneys alleged that with an IQ of 69, Mr. Campbell was below the threshold IQ of 70 generally required for executions. It was this argument that persuaded the federal court on Tuesday, stating, “It is regrettable that we are now reviewing evidence of intellectual disability at the eleventh hour before Campbell’s scheduled execution. However, from the record before us, it appears that we cannot fault Campbell or his attorneys, present or past, for the delay,” because Texas “never disclosed that it was in possession of evidence of three intelligence tests suggesting that Campbell was intellectually disabled.”

Texas accounts for nearly 40 percent of all executions in the United States. Five hundred fifteen men and women have been put to death by lethal injection since 1982 in the state, whose governor, Rick Perry, a candidate in the 2012 Republican primaries, described the process used there as “appropriate.”

Oklahoma’s Precedent

On April 29, Clayton Lockett died after 43 minutes of agony caused by three successive injections at McAlester in Oklahoma. While the condemned man was convulsing, the director of prison administration ordered a halt to his execution. But that did not stop Mr. Lockett from dying from a “massive heart attack.” Barack Obama has described this case as “inhumane.” The execution of another condemned man, to be held the same evening, was suspended for six months. The results of Clayton Lockett’s autopsy may be published in two months. The scandal of “botched” executions erupted publicly in January when, during an execution in Ohio, a condemned man agonized for 10 minutes in front of horrified witnesses.

The Death Penalty in the United States

The number of executions has declined from year to year, principally due to difficulties of obtaining the lethal products, the emotion provoked by errors in judgment, and the release of information relating to the cost of executions. Eighty death sentences were imposed in 2013 by U.S. courts, compared with 315 in 1994, and 39 executions have taken place, compared with 98 in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

To punish a murderer, 48 percent of Americans are in favor of the death penalty while 43 percent prefer a sentence of life in prison, according to a recent poll. But the principal support for capital punishment—60 percent vs. 35 percent—is today the lowest in 40 years. In 1972, following a Supreme Court judgment invalidating the death penalty laws of all the States, executions stopped for four years. Favorable opinions toward capital punishment peaked at 80 percent in 1994.

Since the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976, 82 percent of executions have taken place in Southern states. Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma and Virginia make up the front line after Texas.

According to a study from the University of Iowa, an accused black person was 1.7 times more likely to be executed than a white person; the murderer of a white person was 4.3 times more likely to be condemned to death than the murderer of a black person. The number of executions has fallen by half since 1976 and the number of capital punishment sentences has fallen by two-thirds. Out of 50 American states, 18 have abolished the death penalty and only nine have actually carried out executions in the last two years. According to the FBI, states that do not practice capital punishment are characterized by homicide rates that are lower than or equal to the national average.