Brandi Grissom of the Texas Tribune conducts the interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning UT scholar. Oshinsky's latest book is Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America.
It's titled, "David Oshinsky: The TT Interview." It's a must-listen.
It's not the fact Texas has executed more people than any other state or even the recent DNA-provoked questions about whether innocent men here have been put to death that make the state's use of the ultimate punishment scandalous, says Pulitzer Prize-winning author and University of Texas at Austin history professor David Oshinsky. It's the fact that the condemned in Texas have so few resources to defend themselves against prosecutors who have become experts at sending criminals to their death.
Texas has executed more than 450 men and women accused of capital crimes since 1976 — but from the early 1960s until 1976, there were few executions here and throughout the nation. In his latest book, Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America, Oshinsky explores the case that nearly led to the demise of the death penalty in the United States and then to its eventual resurgence. He talked with the Tribune last week about his research and about what makes the death penalty in Texas so peculiar.
And:
The unusual thing about Texas' new death penalty law, Oshinsky said, was that it required juries to act as sort of fortune tellers and decide whether the defendant was likely to commit future crimes. That was how Texas got its own "Dr. Death" in psychiatrist Dr. James Grigson.
Aside from its frequent use of "Dr. Death," Oshinsky said, there were a number of factors that combined to keep Texas' death chamber the busiest in the nation. Elected judges are more likely to take the popular position in favor of using the death penalty to keep law and order, he said. And the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which oversees Texas, is among the most conservative and tough courts in the nation. Given those judicial conditions, it's highly unlikely, Oshinsky said, that death row inmates could have much success on appeal. Plus, Texas has a tradition steeped in slavery and religious conservatism that calls for death as rightful punishment for some crimes. The top factor in Texas that bolsters the execution numbers, he said, is the lack of a state public defender system to assign qualified lawyers to indigent suspects.
And there's one more reason: Kenneth McDuff.
Earlier coverage of the book is here.
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