Texas has another accomplishment to be proud of!

The 500th Execution since the reinstatement of capital punishment!

Texas Department of Corrections in Huntsville TX.
The Walls Unit's clock ticking away till 600PM.

Woman will be 500th execution since Texas resumed death penalty

HUNTSVILLE - The illuminated clock set in red-brick facade of the Walls Unit may be the most dreaded timepiece in Texas. Minute by minute, it ticks away dreary years behind bars. On some days - 15 times last year, 40 times in 2000 - its black hands signal another criminal justice milestone.

Six o'clock, the hands say. Another killer will be dead and gone.

Barring a last-minute stay, Kimberly McCarthy on June 26 will become the 500th Texas killer to be executed since the state re-activated the death penalty in 1976. Texas leads the nation's 33 death penalty states in executions, killing more than the next five most active states combined.

Virginia, with 110 executions, places second.

Minutes before the killing hour, McCarthy, 52, condemned for the 1997 murder-robbery of a 70-year-old Dallas County woman, will be strapped to a gurney in a room deep within the 164-year-old prison. Then, as a warden and chaplain stand silently nearby, she will be injected with a lethal dose of a drug commonly used to euthanize cats and dogs.

McCarthy, a one-time occupational therapist and home health care worker, will be the fourth woman in Texas executed by injection.

Supported by law since Texas' earliest days, executions like hers remain at the heart of a raging dispute pitting most Texans against an array of death penalty opponents here and abroad.

Issues of justice arise as prisoners, including some on death row, are shown years after their convictions to be innocent, and scrutiny is directed to cases of executed men whose convictions were based on questionable investigations. Increasingly, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has found itself challenged to carry out executions as death penalty opponents pressure drug makers to stop sales to executioners.

Nonetheless, capital punishment retains strong support in Texas. Last year, a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found almost three-fourths of respondents favored executions. Nationally, a Gallup Poll found 63 percent endorsed capital punishment.

Killers from Harris County, Texas' most populous county, fill the Polunksy Unit's death row. Since 1982, 118 Harris County killers have been executed; 100 remain at the Livingston prison. Fifty Dallas County killers have been put to death; 37 from Bexar, the county encompassing San Antonio.

And the author write it like that is a bad thing.

Typical of the extremes in the death penalty debate are Ray Hunt, the Houston Police Officers Union president, who calls for expanding the death penalty to cases of brutal child abuse, and Anthony Graves, who was condemned for murders he did not commit.

"There's no doubt in my mind," Hunt says when asked if executions have made Texas safer. "The 500 people who are executed - they have no opportunity to brutally murder again."

Counters Graves, who was released from prison in 2010 after prosecutors admitted he had been wrongly convicted in the August 1992 killings of six Somerville residents: "For me, the death penalty is a slap in the face. I spent 18 years in prison, 12 of them on death row with two execution dates, and it doesn't even slow down. It says to me: 'Your life has no value.' "

An avid death penalty supporter, Gov. Rick Perry has defied the United Nations in refusing to intervene in the executions of foreign nationals. In a 2011 presidential debate that brought cheers from Republican supporters, Perry remarked that he "never struggled" with allowing executions to occur.

"In the state of Texas," he said, "if you come to our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you're involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice …"

Rick, I've had some disagreements with you on certain issues but on this you are steel on target.

...International attention

Slowly Texas' revamped death penalty gained momentum. By the late 1990s, executions topped 35 a year. A record 40 killers were put to death in 2000. In June 2000, Texas executed Gary Graham, convicted of a 1981 Houston supermarket robbery-murder.

In a case that drew international attention, prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of an eyewitness, who said she saw Graham accost a shopper in a dimly lighted parking lot. Graham claimed innocence but admitted that he had committed a string of violent crimes. Civil rights leaders Coretta Scott King, Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson rallied to his cause, but to no avail.

From the gurney, Graham denounced his execution as "a lynching."

The author write this like it's a bad thing.  Not to mention the list of supporters their ain't exaclty supporting.  Al and Jess are not exactly known as men of honesty.  But I digress.

David Atwood, founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, found Graham convincing.

"I very strongly believed Graham had not committed the crime," the Houston activist says. "… I think there's pretty strong evidence - it's hard to say it's 100 percent - that in three or four instances we could have executed someone who's innocent."

Cases concerning him include those of Ruben Cantu, executed in 1993 for a San Antonio robbery-murder the former district attorney now believes he probably did not commit; Carlos DeLuna, put to death in 1989 for a Corpus Christi robbery-murder, the investigation of which Columbia University law students critique as flawed; and Cameron Willingham, executed in 2004 for the murder of his three young children in a Corsicana house fire...

I got it, a man who makes his living is the founder of non profit group wanting to notionally end the death penalty says he doens't want the death penalty.  And he thinks people who are not guilty have been executed.  This is news....right!

David Weeks, the Walker County district attorney and a former president of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, says such failings largely occurred in "old cases."

"I think that to a large extent, it's not the same old world, not the same old situation it was," he says. "We've done quite a lot to make sure the process works. Can it be improved more? Probably so, but we have to realize how far we've come."

Now, Weeks argues, lawyers appointed to represent accused killers are "well qualified," and DNA investigation tools work to lessen the chance of false arrests.

Changes to the Texas death sentence have come from inside and outside the state.

In 2005, the Texas Legislature for the first time enabled juries to sentence capital killers to life without parole. Since then, 535 death penalty-eligible killers, 144 from Harris County, have been assessed lifelong incarceration. No death sentences were handed down in Harris County in 2012.

Fifteen Texas killers were executed in 2012; McCarthy will be the eighth this year.

One of the points I make with anti capital punishment people is if you get rid of executions and go to life without parole, how soon before the usual suspects start saying "Life without parole, that's really inhumane." In some of the expected states (New York) there are cop killers that the state has tried to parole. Sorry, cop killers should be put down like the rabid dogs there are, barring that they should never see daylight as a free man.

So California, Illinois, New York, etc, please, imprison your worse as you will.  Texas will permanently rehabilitate a rabid animal of a human in a few hours and it will be no loss to humanity.  Hopefully she gets more justice than she's earned at her next hearing.  That will be a judge she cannot lie to.


UPDATE: 

IT HAS HAPPENED.  KIMBERLY MCCARTHY WAS PERMANENTLY REHABILITATED!

CNN) -- Kimberly McCarthy on Wednesday evening became the 500th prisoner executed in Texas since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated in the state, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

McCarthy was put to death at 7:37 p.m. ET at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, said department spokesman John Hurt.

 

The 52-year-old former occupational therapist was convicted in 1997 of murdering her elderly neighbor. Authorities said McCarthy entered the retired professor's home intending to rob her; a struggle ensued, and McCarthy repeatedly stabbed her, according to the state's criminal justice

website.

 

McCarthy then took the victim's credit cards and vehicle...