Fewer Texans sentenced to death, executed amid “evolving standards of decency”

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In 1982, Texas was the first in the world to execute an inmate by lethal injection, its first execution since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Quickly, the state became the United States’ top executioner and is among the top three in imposing death sentences.

At the turn of the century in 2000, the population on Texas’ death row reached a record high of 459 inmates and officials carried out 40 executions, the most in a single year. Decades later, the state’s interest in capital punishment appears to have cooled, according to available data, influenced by cultural shifts, legal updates and what some experts have called “evolving standards of decency.”

In 2022, the death row population dropped to under 200 inmates for the first time in almost three decades, and by the start of 2025, there were 174 people on Texas’ death row. Still, Texas has executed more people than the next four states combined since 1982, a trend largely upheld by a few urban counties — the top three of which are responsible for more than 40% of the state’s executions.

“The death penalty is no longer an American story, it's really a local story,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “It's about which local jurisdictions are using it, and those decisions that are being made by their local elected officials.”

Five men were executed by Texas in 2024, the sixth year in a row in which there were less than 10 executions. A little more than half of those sentenced to death in Texas — almost 600 of more than 1,100 inmates — have been executed since 1977. Since 2020, almost as many people on death row in the state have had their sentences reduced or convictions overturned as those executed, with 24 executions and 22 sentence reductions, most due to intellectual disability. Nine men also have died on death row before their execution date since 2020.

The slowdown in death sentences isn’t something that can be attributed to one thing but rather a buildup of legal and social factors, said Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a grassroots advocacy group whose focus is on death penalty education and abolition.

One of the most significant reasons for the decline was the state adopted life sentences without parole as an option to capital punishment in 2005. Texas was the last state with the death penalty to do so, according to the coalition’s 2024 report.

“That has given prosecutors and juries more discretion in terms of how they handle capital cases,” Houlé Cuellar said. “So what we've seen is that in the vast majority — and by vast majority, I would say 99-point-something-percent of capital cases — prosecutors in Texas are not pursuing the death penalty as a sentencing option.”

The financial costs of a death sentence to counties is also a factor prosecutors, specifically in rural counties, must consider when seeking the death penalty.

After the capital murder trials of three men who dragged James Byrd Jr., a Black man, for 3 miles and left his body outside an African American church in 1998, Jasper County was forced to raise its property taxes by more than 8% because of the cost to the county — $1.1 million of its $10 million budget. Two of the three men, who were self-admitted white supremacists, were executed, one in 2011 and the other in 2019, and the case led to new state and federal hate crime laws. The third man is serving a life sentence.

The moment a district attorney chooses to seek the death penalty on a capital murder charge, the cost increases as those trials often require a more expensive jury selection process, expert witnesses from out of state and a separate trial to determine if execution is warranted. Those costs are incurred by the counties, but long periods of incarceration on death row and yearslong appeals processes are costs the state pays.

“All of this adds up to a very expensive system, and that meter starts running the minute the district attorney decides that [they’re] going to seek the death penalty,” Houlé Cuellar said.

Other significant developments adding to the decline of death penalty convictions occurred in 2017 and 2019 when U.S. Supreme Court rulings originating from Harris County mandated that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals update its standards on disqualifying death sentences based on intellectual disability. Executions of those with intellectual disabilities are considered cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and 18 people have been removed from death row since 2017 based on evidence of intellectual disability.

Despite the decades-long decrease, 2024 had the highest number of new sentences in five years, with six people receiving the death penalty, three alone out of Tarrant County — its first since 2019. Houlé Cuellar said all three trials falling in 2024 is somewhat unintentional because the charges were brought across a three-year period, but the fact the death penalty was pursued at all speaks to a mindset some prosecutors have.

“I think the fact that all three trials happen this year is somewhat random, but the decision to seek the death penalty was very deliberate and reflects a very … aggressive use of the death penalty out of a county that really seems to be going in the opposite direction from the rest of the state,” Houlé Cuellar said.

Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells said in a statement to the Texas Tribune that choosing to levy the death penalty against anyone is “never an easy decision,” but clarified the juries in all three cases in 2024 agreed with the sentencing.

“We don’t often ask for the death penalty,” Sorrells said in the statement. “But in 2024, we asked juries three times to convict capital murderers and give them the death penalty. Three times they agreed.”

Dallas and Harris counties lead in the number of death sentences handed down, but Tarrant County’s three cases in 2024 placed it ahead of Bexar County for third highest in the state. The four counties together represent more than half of all executions in the state, as Harris remained the top county in the U.S. for executions with 135 since 1977, two of which were in 2024.

Public opinion on the death penalty has also split between older and younger Americans. National support for the sentence has dwindled to its lowest since 1972, having dropped more than 10% since 2000, according to an October Gallup poll. And while 53% of U.S. adults overall were in favor of the death penalty in 2024, less than half of Gen Z and Millennial adults supported the sentence.

“As the death penalty has been used less in terms of new death sentences and executions have become fewer, the death penalty is really fading from the minds of many voters to the point that some may conclude it’s simply not necessary,” Maher said.

Ten executions are currently scheduled nationally for 2025, four of which are in Texas. Those four scheduled do not include Robert Roberson, whose execution has not yet been rescheduled after it was temporarily blocked by the Texas Supreme Court in October. Roberson’s case has received national attention because of the contention around his innocence and a bipartisan effort within a Texas House of Representatives committee to halt his execution.

Steven Lawayne Nelson, who was convicted of suffocating a pastor with a plastic bag and assaulting a woman during a church robbery in Arlington, is scheduled to be Texas’ first execution in 2025 on Feb. 5.