A chilling catalog of the men and women who have paid the ultimate price for their crimes The death penalty is one of the most hotly contested and longest-standing issues in American politics, and no place is more symbolic of that debate than Texas. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1977, Texas has put more than 390 prisoners to death, far more than any other state. Texas Death Row puts faces to those condemned men and women, with stark details on their crimes, sentencing, last meals, and last words. Definitive and objective, Texas Death Row will provide ample fuel for readers on both sides of the death penalty debate.

Ken Light and his camera were permitted unparalleled access to Texas death row. His stark, powerful images show where and how the condemned live. In the year he took these pictures, fourteen men were executed in Texas. Suzanne Donovan's essay draws upon her interviews with the condemned men and with prison authorities, family members, and members of victims' families. Whoever opens this book will want to look away, for the pictures and words force us to gaze intimately into the eye of death. Light's photographs make us ask what we have done in sanctioning execution. With ninety percent approval, no other place in America has approved the death sentence so overwhelmingly as Texas. Ken Light's raw, austere photographs and the accompanying text reveal what we have created in the hopeless world of court-ordered death. Who are the men who exist there? What do they look like? How do they survive, and what are the rhythms of their daily lives? While outsiders focus on the final act of execution, the real drama unfolds each day in this arcane world.

An indispensable reference and research tool for capital punishment scholars.

This book explores the identity of Texas as a state with a large and severe penal system. It does so by assessing the narratives at work in Texas museums and tourist sites associated with prisons and punishment. In such cultural institutions, complex narratives are presented, which show celebratory stories of Texan toughness in the penal sphere, as well as poignant stories about the witnessing of executions, comical stories that normalize the harsher aspects of Texan punishment, and presentations about prison officers who have lost their lives in the war on crime. In analysing these representations, the book shows that Texan history plays an important role in the production of Texan self-identity, and that to understand the Texan commitment to harsh punishment we must be prepared to focus on Texan myths and memories. Prisons and Punishment in Texas draws on diverse interdisciplinary work, including criminology, cultural studies about Southern values, as well as research on cultural memory and dark tourism. Museums are shown to be under-researched sites of criminological significance, which offer rich evidence through which penal imaginaries and the cultural role of punishment can be explored. The book will be of great interest to criminologists as well as scholars of sociology, cultural studies, museum studies and politics.

Each entry in this essential collection of primary resources on capital punishment features an authoritative introduction and analysis that helps provide crucial context for understanding the evolution of law and public attitudes toward the death penalty in America, from colonial times to the present. Showcasing key primary documents that illuminate the ongoing debate and turbulent history of capital punishment in the United States, this collection gathers a wide range of fascinating and momentous documents, including court decisions and transcripts, legislation, personal accounts and perspectives, congressional testimony, and government documents. Since these documents reflect all political perspectives and messaging, students will gain valuable insight into the evolution of public opinion and government policy on the death penalty in America. To better understand these documents, each primary source is prefaced with an introduction and followed by scholarly analysis. These documents and accompanying analysis complement one another, helping students gain a better and more accurate understanding of the viewpoints, convictions, and perspectives that have shaped American attitudes and practices toward capital punishment since the United States' earliest days.

In 1993, José Medellín, an eighteen-year-old Mexican national who lived most of his life in the United States, was arrested for his participation in the gang rape and murder of two girls in Houston, Texas. Despite telling police that he was born in Mexico, he was never informed of his right to contact the Mexican Consulate, a right guaranteed to him by Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The Mexican government filed suit against the United States in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ruled that the United States had violated the rights of both Mexico and Medellín, along with fifty-one other Mexican nationals in other cases. The ICJ instructed the United States to provide “review and reconsideration” of the convictions and sentences of the fifty-two Mexican nationals. Armed with this new decision, Medellín sought a writ of habeas corpus, which was denied by the lower courts. He petitioned for a writ of certiorari, which the Supreme Court granted, twice. While President George W. Bush sided with the ICJ, the State of Texas, under Solicitor General Ted Cruz, argued against the president. Despite a nearly universal belief among court watchers and legal scholars that Texas would lose, the Court in a 6–3 decision ruled in favor of Texas and against Medellín in June 2008. Medellín was executed just two months later. In this volume Alan Mygatt-Tauber tells the story of Medellín v. Texas, showing how the Court’s 2008 ruling grappled with the complex question of how a united republic that respects the dual sovereignty of its constituent parts struggles to comply with its international obligations. But this is also a story of international human rights and the anomalous position of the United States regarding the death penalty compared to other nations. In the closing chapters, the author explores the aftermath of the execution, including the continued effort of Mexico to seek justice for its nationals. Mygatt-Tauber offers a detailed examination of the case at every stage of proceedings—trial, appeal, at the International Court of Justice, and in both trips to the Supreme Court. He provides never-before-revealed information about the thinking of the Bush White House in the decision to comply with the ICJ’s judgment and to withdraw from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention that granted the ICJ jurisdiction.

Texas pride, like everything else in the state, is larger than life. So, too, perhaps, are the state’s challenges. Lone Star Tarnished approaches public policy in the nation’s most populous "red state" from historical, comparative, and critical perspectives. The historical perspective provides the scope for asking how various policy domains have developed in Texas history, regularly reaching back to the state’s founding and with substantial data for the period 1950 to the present. In each chapter, Cal Jillson compares Texas public policy choices and results with those of other states and the United States in general. Finally, the critical perspective allows us to question the balance of benefits and costs attendant to what is often referred to as "the Texas way" or "the Texas model." Jillson delves deeply into seven substantive policy chapters, covering the most important policy areas in which state governments are active. Through his lively and lucid prose, students are well equipped to analyze how Texas has done and is doing compared to selected states and the national average over time and today. Readers will also come away with the necessary tools to assess the many claims of Texas’s exceptionalism.

In 1976 the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the legality of capital punishment in their ruling on Gregg v. Georgia. In the forty-six years since the decision was handed down, 1,551 convicted prisoners have been executed. The United States is the only Western nation—and one of four advanced democracies—that regularly applies the death penalty. While the death penalty is legal in twenty-seven states, only twenty-one have the means to carry out death sentences. Of those states, Texas has executed the most prisoners in recent history, putting 578 people to death since the 1976 ruling, beginning with Charlie Brooks in 1982. Texas retains the third-largest death row population, behind California and Florida. In the summer of 2020, the Trump administration broke a nearly seventeen-year stay during which the federal government did not sanction any executions when it put thirteen inmates to death over six months. Seventeen of the forty-five current federal death row inmates, the highest proportion of any state, are incarcerated in Texas. Final Words addresses the death penalty in the United States as a violation of human rights. Consisting of a collection of government documents relating to the 578 executed Texas inmates, this sweeping project presents a portrait of each life brought to a violent end, including final moments that are often spent expressing words of love for family and friends, sorrow for victims, and even gratitude. The compilation stands as a stark indictment of institutions that are rampant with racism, classism, and sexism. Each entry, each story, each utterance will challenge readers to answer the question: is there room for humanity in the American justice system?

I don't know when we will stop murdering people whether randomly on the streets or systematically in our death chambers. The only way to prevent continuation of the suffering and grief murder occasions in to prevent murder. I have worked with eighteen people who have been executed and five of those I'm convinced were innocent--the words of Joe Ingle, said to be a 1988 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, from Part I (which looks at those who are involved with the fight against the death sentence).The guy I am convicted of killing shot me three times before I fired at him, ...When I look back on life and think about it, I wonder why those thirteen people can decide if I should die. ...Society does not feel our pain, the horror of knowing the exact hour and day that they will set us in the chair and kill us--Mr. D., one of the 11 death row inmates interviewed in Part II. Part III interviews family members.This thought-provoking collection provides much insight on this controversial issue. The United States stand on the death penalty, in light of U.S. leadership in human rights, appears to be a contradiction to the rest of the world. The methods of execution are sometimes extremely painful and not quick. An overwhelming percentage of those on death row are impoverished and would not be there if they had other resources besides desultory and ineffective court-appointed counsel. These and other important issues are poignantly addressed.