TX – Texas put a prisoner to death on Wednesday evening for the first time in about 10 months — signaling that states are ready to resume executions after a hiatus during much of the pandemic.
Family members of Quintin Jones, 41, had hoped that either the U.S. Supreme Court or Gov. Greg Abbott would spare his life or grant a last-minute reprieve. Neither came.
Jones was executed by lethal injection at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville and pronounced dead at 6:40 p.m., around 10 minutes after the lethal dose began, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said.
His execution was carried out without media witnesses. The agency blamed a “miscommunication between officials” for shutting out reporters and apologized for the “critical error” and vowed to investigate how it happened.
The Fort Worth man was convicted of fatally beating his great-aunt, Berthena Bryant, in 1999 with a baseball bat and stealing $30 to buy drugs.
Texas put a prisoner to death on Wednesday evening for the first time in about 10 months — signaling that states are ready to resume executions after a hiatus during much of the pandemic.
Family members of Quintin Jones, 41, had hoped that either the U.S. Supreme Court or Gov. Greg Abbott would spare his life or grant a last-minute reprieve. Neither came.
Jones was executed by lethal injection at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville and pronounced dead at 6:40 p.m., around 10 minutes after the lethal dose began, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said.
His execution was carried out without media witnesses. The agency blamed a “miscommunication between officials” for shutting out reporters and apologized for the “critical error” and vowed to investigate how it happened.
The Fort Worth man was convicted of fatally beating his great-aunt, Berthena Bryant, in 1999 with a baseball bat and stealing $30 to buy drugs.
Jones’ case had gained renewed attention for other reasons: Some of his family members publicly supported his clemency petition, writing that he “is remorseful and has changed for the better” and that killing him “can’t bring her [Bryant] back.”
In addition, the case required that the jury, in applying the death penalty, determine that Jones posed a “future dangerousness” — a concept that critics say is based on disputed science and inaccurate data, and could be clouded by racial bias. Jones’ clemency application said he had a “nonviolent history during his two decades of incarceration.”
Texas is the only state that requires juries to weigh “future dangerousness” in capital punishment cases after Oregon did away with the practice in 2019.
David Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston who has represented death row inmates, said the idea of “future dangerousness” can be subjective and vague, with jurors needing to predict whether a defendant could pose a threat again and where they might lash out, such as in prison or out in society if they were released.
The American Psychiatric Association, the nation’s largest psychiatric organization, has filed briefs to the Supreme Court arguing that the “unreliability of psychiatric predictions of long-term future dangerousness is by now an established fact within the profession.”
A 2004 study by the Texas Defender Service, a group that represents defendants in capital cases, found that of the more than 150 cases it reviewed, only 5 percent of inmates later engaged in serious assaults, while 75 percent had infractions that did not involve serious assaults or were for minor incidents like having food in their cells, and the remaining 20 percent of inmates had no disciplinary violations. In addition, only two inmates were later prosecuted for crimes while behind bars.
Dow said Jones was “sentenced to death, not for what he did, but because of what a jury predicted he would do, and that prediction has proven false — that is, Jones has been a nonviolent and model prisoner, demonstrating he could in fact be kept in prison with no risk to the outside population, or to the inmate or guard population either.”
Texas is the only state that requires juries to weigh “future dangerousness” in capital punishment cases after Oregon did away with the practice in 2019.
David Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston who has represented death row inmates, said the idea of “future dangerousness” can be subjective and vague, with jurors needing to predict whether a defendant could pose a threat again and where they might lash out, such as in prison or out in society if they were released.
The American Psychiatric Association, the nation’s largest psychiatric organization, has filed briefs to the Supreme Court arguing that the “unreliability of psychiatric predictions of long-term future dangerousness is by now an established fact within the profession.”
