Texas to execute 500th person
Kimberly McCarthy, 52, is scheduled to be executed today for the 1997 stabbing of her neighbor, marking Texas’s 500th execution since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976. Over this period, Texas has executed far more prisoners than any other state with number two Virginia nearly 400 behind.
According to the Texas Tribune, Governor Rick Perry has overseen the executions of 261 people since he assumed office in 2000.
Ms. McCarthy is an African-American who was sentenced to death in 2002 for murdering a white woman. That’s not surprising: In Texas as well as other states, a black person who murders a white person is more likely to receive the death penalty than when the victim is black.
The 12-person jury that convicted and sentenced Ms. McCarthy included only one person who wasn’t white, after prosecutors used their peremptory, or automatic, challenges to strike three other non-whites. That was in apparent violation of a Supreme Court ruling against purposeful exclusion of minorities from a jury when a minority is the defendant.
Ms. McCarthy was convicted and sentenced in Dallas County, Texas where the prosecutor’s office has a well-documented history of intentional discrimination going back to the 19th century. Calling it history, though, misrepresents the reality. The discrimination has continued, on a modern foundation of deliberate bias.
PROUD TO BE TEXAN?
NOT!
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