Texas Tallies 60% of Executions

As the rest of the country backed away from applying the death penalty in 2007, Texas kept up its customary pace, making the state responsible for an astounding 60% of all executions in the US. Of last year's 42 executions, 26 were in Texas, the New York Times reports. In other states, rising doubts about the humaneness of lethal injections and the fairness of sentencing have undermined support, even as a series of Supreme Court rulings eventually led to a moratorium this fall.

Some experts predict a time when virtually all executions will be exacted in Texas. “The reason that Texas will end up monopolizing executions,” one defender of death-row inmates in the state told the Times, “is because every other state will eliminate it de jure, as New Jersey did, or de facto, as other states have.” (More death penalty stories.)