By Joy Diaz, KUT News
HUNTSVILLE – Kimberly McCarthy is scheduled to die by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas this evening. Her upcoming death has caught national and international attention because, if the execution is carried out, she will be the 500th person and fourth woman executed in Texas since the death penalty was re-instated in 1976.
For all the debate the death penalty elicits nationally and internationally, there’s one place where it simply is not discussed: Huntsville, Texas – the town where executions are carried out.
JIM WILLET: “I’m gonna tell you, now this is just Jim Willet now talking, but in my opinion, most people just ignore it.”
Jim Willet directs the Texas Prison Museum in the heart of Huntsville. He showed me around several rooms that chronicle the history of capital punishment in Texas. Willet used to be the warden who oversaw the execution of prisoners at Huntsville prison. He says, even though about 70 percent of Texans support the death penalty, it’s clear times are changing.
WILLET: “When I first started keeping up with all of this – maybe we’re talking 7, 8, 9 years ago – We had nearly 500 males on death row. Last time I looked, I don’t know, 2 or 3 months ago, we had 284. So, it’s way down from what it used to…one of the years, I don’t remember, maybe the year 2000 we did 30 – oh! – I can’t remember – maybe 36 executions maybe in one year.”
There were actually 40 executions in 2000. In 2012 there were 15. Since 2005, Texas jurors have had the option of sentencing a person to life without parole instead of death. When it comes to the death penalty in Texas, changes have always come by way of a legal mandate. For instance, back in 1923 the state ordered counties to stop executing people on their own, with hangings and shooting squads. And that all executions must be carried out in Huntsville. The electric chair became the state’s preferred method. Rob Owen runs the Capital Punishment Clinic at UT Austin’s school of law. He says the next big change came in 1972 when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional.
ROB OWEN: “Once the Supreme Court said the existing system doesn’t work and they basically swept aside all of the existing death penalty laws, states around the country, including Texas sort of went back to the drawing board legislatively and they came up with ways to try and limit the death penalty to – as we sometimes say – the worst of the worst.”
Texas reinstated the death penalty in 1976. The first lethal injection of a prisoner was in 1982. In the years since, the state has executed hundreds of prisoners — with rare exonerations and commutations grabbing headlines like the case of Ernest Willis in 2004 or Kenneth Foster’s in 2007. Many of those cases highlighted what opponents call the system’s fatal flaws – poor and minority defendants over represented on death row; badly prepared public defenders, and even prosecutors who withhold exculpatory evidence. Those flaws distress state representative Harold Dutton.
HAROLD DUTTON: “Every time I see where someone’s been executed in Texas, I think, it’s me who did it.”
Dutton is a Democrat from Houston. He says after his election in 1985 he filed his first bill to abolish the death penalty. He’s filed the same bill every session since.
DUTTON: “because the legislature actually provided the statutes that permit the death penalty to be imposed. The only time that would ever stop is because the legislature stopped it.”
As Texas prepares to execute its 500th prisoner tonight — Maurie Levin is feverishly working to prevent it. She represents Kimberly McCarthy, who was convicted of the 1997 robbery and murder of 71-year-old Dorothy Booth. I visited Levin at her office earlier this week. She sat by her desk with her face glued to her computer screen.
MAURIE LEVIN: “I’m feeling particularly stressed out – right now.”
Levin has filed several appeals to prevent McCarthy’s execution. On that day she was waiting for an answer via e-mail from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. When she noticed an official looking white envelope in her mailbox. She got up from her desk and ripped it open.
LEVIN: “This is the letter that you get when you’re supposed to be a witness to an execution.”
If McCarthy’s appeals fail, Levin will drive about 3 hours to be by her side as she is put to death.
For supporters, 500 executions is a sign that Texas is tough on crime; for opponents, that something is wrong here. Of the 32 states with the death penalty, the state that comes closest to it in number of executions is Virginia, with 110. UT’s Rob Owen says a number of factors, including representative’s Dutton bill that won’t go away, and the shrinking number of death penalty convictions, may foreshadow the end of capital punishment in Texas.
OWEN: “I’m always startled to be reminded that after World War II, we executed hundreds of war criminals in Europe. And yet, Europe has now completely turned its back on the death penalty. So, it could happen with surprising speed. But it may be too hard to know until it overtakes us that it is happening.”
New Jersey, New Mexico and Illinois have repealed the death penalty since 2007. Last year California voters voted down a repeal.
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