Burnt Orange Report

Life Without Parole Signed - Now What?

By Jim Dallas

SB60, the life-without-possibility-of-parole bill, was signed last week by Governor Perry after the Guv sent out some mixed signals. The bill also makes Texas law compatible with the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision Roper v. Simmons by prohibiting executions for offenders under the age of 18 at the time of the crime.

Will this new option reduce the number of executions? Death penalty opponents hope so. Anecdotal evidence from other states, like Virginia, suggest that in the short-term, there was a drop-off in death sentences. Nonetheless, a look at the sentencing statistics shows that Virginia juries handed out an average of 5.3 death sentences per year between 1995 and 2003, which is only slightly lower than the average of 6.4 in the nine-year period between 1986 and 1994 (when life without parole did not exist in Virginia).

Nationally, the overall sentencing rate has dropped considerably, with about half as many death sentences handed out in the early 2000s as in the early 1990s. This may be, in part, due to the fact that just about every state now has a life without parole statute. But it probably has more to do with the fact that the underlying homicide rate has also fallen by about 50 percent. Moreover, juries may be less inclined to vote death for other reasons (as the Houston Press noted a few weeks ago, Harris County DAs haven't been getting death sentences like they used to, and this was of course before the life without parole bill was passed).

I don't think that the new life without parole statute will end up making much of a difference. A much better way of ensuring that Texas Death Row is truly for the "worst of the worst" would be to create a half-decent statewide public defender program so that we don't have any more horror stories about sleeping, drunken, or otherwise incompetent defense counsel.