That's the title of an Texas AP dispatch by Mike Graczyk, via the San Antonio Express-News. LINK
The nation's busiest death chamber reopens this week after a nearly 9-month hiatus with the scheduled lethal injection of a former part-time car-wash worker for killing a suburban Houston woman and her young son 17 years ago.
The execution Tuesday of Derrick Sonnier, 40, would make him the fourth prisoner put to death in the nation since the U.S. Supreme Court in April upheld lethal injection as a proper method of capital punishment but the first in Texas since last Sept. 25. That's when convicted killer Michael Richard was executed in Huntsville the same day the high court decided to consider a challenge from two condemned inmates in Kentucky who contended lethal injection was unconstitutionally cruel.
The Kentucky case effectively stalled all executions around the nation. For Texas, where 405 convicted killers have received lethal injection since the state resumed carrying out capital punishment in 1982, the execution lull has been the lengthiest in two decades.
"I pretty much figured ... it was just a delay," said convicted murderer Karl Chamberlain, set to die a week after Sonnier for a slaying in Dallas County. "So after they (the Supreme Court) made that ruling, I was expecting a date any time."
"It's going to be a bloodbath with the state of Texas, like old day lynchings," said Kevin Watts, who has an execution date of Oct. 16 for a triple killing in San Antonio.
He and Sonnier are among at least 14 Texas inmates with execution dates as Texas is poised to quickly reassume its notoriety as the country's most active state in carrying out the death penalty. Of the 42 executions in the United States last year, 26 were in Texas. The next busiest states were Alabama and Oklahoma, each with three.
Statistics kept by the Death Penalty Information Center list only nine other inmates from elsewhere in the nation with active execution dates. Sonnier is the first of three Texas prisoners scheduled to be taken to the death chamber over 14 days in June.
TDCJ maintains a list of scheduled executions, here.
Comments