Damning Report On Texas Death Row Cases: 'The System Is Utterly Broken'

Harris County, Texas, has executed more people than anywhere else in the country. In most Harris County cases ending in a death sentence over the previous 20 years, defense lawyers failed to find and present compelling evidence that could have kept their clients off of death row, according to a two-part report published on Monday by the Wren Collective, a group of former public defenders who do criminal justice research and policy.

The report authors reviewed 28 cases, which accounts for the vast majority of Harris County cases that resulted in a death sentence over the past two decades. The authors excluded a handful of cases in which post-conviction litigation, which provides insight into what occurred at trial, had either not been filed at the time of review or contained insufficient detail about trial proceedings. They reviewed court filings, jail visit records, billing records and interviewed judges, trial and post-conviction lawyers and mitigation specialists.

In each of those cases, the report authors found that trial attorneys missed important evidence that could have convinced a prosecutor to drop a death sentence or a juror to choose a life sentence, including evidence of mental illness, intellectual disability, physical abuse and sexual abuse. In many cases, attorneys failed to prepare key witnesses until the day they were scheduled to testify.

“The stakes of capital murder cases could not possibly be higher, and yet for decades, people have gone to death row with serious intellectual disability claims and lengthy histories of severe physical and sexual abuse,” said Wren Collective founder Jessica Brand, who has previously worked at the Texas Defender Service. “It is not because juries did not believe their stories — it’s because they never heard them.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/harris-county-texas-death-penalty-report_n_6574d077e4b0fca7ad20fd27

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