Houston’s Death Penalty Hullabaloo
My take on Houston’s latest death penalty flap for the Huffington Post. District Judge Kevin Fine may have acted precipitously in ruling Texas’s capital punishment procedures unconstitutional last week, thereby opening himself to a torrent of criticism, but his reasoning is sound. In fact, Texas’s capital practices are so deeply flawed and prone to error, from indictment to clemency appeals, that the Lone Star State is almost surely carrying out, with surprising frequency, what Sandra Day O’Conner called constitutionally intolerable events: the execution of innocent persons. Robert Perkinson: Houston’s Death Penalty Hullabaloo.
