governors

Thank you for your hard work and leadership. We are a better State and Country because of you and Equal Justice USA.

There is a very strong case to be made for a review of our death penalty statutes and even look at the possibility of having life without parole so we don't look up one day and determined that we as the state of Texas have executed someone who is in fact innocent.

Regardless of my personal opinion about the death penalty, I do not have confidence in the criminal justice system as it currently operates to be the final arbiter when it comes to who lives and who dies for their crime. If the State is going to undertake this awesome responsibility, the system to impose this ultimate penalty must be perfect and can never be wrong. But the reality is the system is not perfect – far from it.

I spent almost nine years as the Prosecutor of Essex County. And in that capacity I sent seventeen people to the electric chair... it was me who decided which cases would be exposed to the death penalty. And I think that that's shocking. It was me. And I remember one case where I withdrew a recommendation for the death penalty because the attorney for the defendant was having a nervous breakdown. And that man did not go, was not sentenced to the electric chair, and not because of the evaluation of the case, but because his lawyer was having a nervous breakdown. That's how arbitrary it can be.