Texas Shrugs Off Debate on Executions

Death Row Routine Marches On as Other States Weigh Issues of Fairness and Error

By Lee Hockstader

September 22, 2002

AUSTIN -- Ron Shamburger was executed before sundown Wednesday evening, strapped with leather belts to a gurney in Texas's cramped death chamber, shrouded with an ironed white sheet, attended by a chaplain and a warden.

 Shamburger, a confessed murderer, uttered his last statement into a microphone rigged inches above his face and began to sing a hymn. Then, a one-two-three chemical punch was injected into his veins, sedating him, collapsing his lungs and stopping his heart. He sighed and was still. A doctor listened for a pulse, found none and pronounced him dead at 6:17 p.m. He was 30.

 The particulars of Shamburger's ghastly crime and antiseptic death -- his killing of a 20-year-old student he had dated; his lawyer's forlorn attempts to forestall the end -- were compelling enough. But few Texans took notice. As the 26th execution by the state this year -- the third in nine days and the second in 24 hours -- Shamburger's finale, like other recent applications of Texas's death penalty, was practically routine.

 Of 61 convicts who have been or are scheduled for execution in the United States this year, 35 of them are in Texas. Rarely since the mid-1970s, when the Supreme Court permitted the resumption of capital punishment, has a state conducted so large a share of all executions in the nation.

 As Texas forges ahead with executions, it appears to be swimming against what critics of capital punishment say is a gathering national tide. In some states, DNA testing, erroneous convictions, the formidable cost of the appeals process and the disproportionate application of the death penalty against minorities have combined to slow the pace of executions. Illinois and Maryland have declared moratoriums on executions pending reviews. Indiana has commissioned a study. Elsewhere, a variety of state legislation to scrutinize the death penalty is in the pipeline.

 But in Texas, public debate over the death penalty is muted, and there is little official soul-searching. Tropical storms, rising insurance premiums, mold-ridden houses and college football generate far more media attention and solemn public discourse than all but a handful of executions in Texas. Political candidates, Democrats and Republicans who uniformly support the death penalty, have sought advantage this year by accusing one another of being soft on executing the mentally retarded and fumbling prosecutions in capital cases. Texas juries sometimes return death sentences after less than an hour's deliberation.

 "All the elements are there in Texas for support [of executions] -- the politicians, the courts, the public," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, which is critical of capital punishment. "It's something they've committed themselves to despite the different direction in other parts of the country, where things are slowing down."

 When Shamburger was put to death, a handful of death penalty opponents showed up to protest -- an ardent band of regulars that generally numbers fewer than 12. Outside College Station, the university town where Shamburger, a Texas A&M University medical student, turned himself in to police after shooting fellow student Lori Baker during a burglary in 1994, most of the Texas media made little of the news.

 "There is no reaction . . . because it is practically a weekly event," said Jim Marcus, executive director of the Houston-based Texas Defender Service, whose lawyers represent prisoners in capital cases.

 State officials and prosecutors insist there is nothing routine about putting a convict to death. Yet Texas has carried out more than a third of all executions in the United States since 1976, a total of 282, including Shamburger's punishment. An additional 456 inmates are on the state's death row, second only to California. In some ways, the procedures and personnel attending capital punishment here suggest a deft familiarity and efficiency that are difficult to picture elsewhere.

 There is, for instance, the usual flurry of 11th-hour appeal by defense lawyers largely resigned to their clients' fate. "If we didn't have hope, we'd go jump off the cliff, but I'd say the prognosis is not good," Shamburger's attorney, Edward Mallett, said a few days before the execution.

 Then there is the ritual of execution day, in which the prisoner is taken from the maximum-security prison in Livingston, Tex., where death row convicts are housed, to Huntsville, 40 miles to the west, home of the state's death chamber. Prisoners typically meet with a chaplain, who help them prepare a final statement, and take a final meal.

 At 6 p.m., the prisoner is taken from the holding cell and led into the adjacent death chamber. He is strapped to the gurney and catheters are inserted in his arms. Witnesses, including state officials, journalists and relatives of the prisoner and the victim, are led into two small observation rooms separated from the death chamber by thick glass. The prisoner is allowed to give a last statement. Then the lethal cocktail of chemicals begins flowing. Minutes later, he is dead.

 In Huntsville, a city of 35,078 that is an hour's drive north of Houston and could reasonably be called the execution capital of America, Shamburger's death was a nonevent.

 Unseen and unheard, it took place, like all executions, at The Walls unit, an imposing 19th-century brick structure just off Huntsville's main street. Prisoners are put to death in a small room painted turquoise. In the rare event that strangers come around asking about capital punishment -- European anti-death penalty crusaders, left-leaning graduate students, reporters -- locals shrug off questions about the death penalty.

 "Maybe it's true that people in Europe or wherever look at us as a bunch of gangsters," said Jerry Johnson, 51, a factory painter who was eating a chicken fried steak at downtown Huntsville's Texas Cafe about an hour before the execution. "Texas just doesn't mess around."

 In its laissez faire and occasionally ardent support of capital punishment, Huntsville is a microcosm of the state. Seventy-three percent of Texans favor the death penalty, according to a Scripps Howard Texas Poll conducted in May and June. That is a drop from 1988, when 86 percent of Texans classified themselves as supporters. But it remains sufficiently broad that prosecutors and politicians speak against capital punishment at their peril .

 Harris County District Attorney Charles A. Rosenthal Jr. is a prominent death penalty hawk who has little patience for critics of Texas's death penalty. He suggests they would have less to say if they scrutinized the chilling details of particular murders, as he does. He suspects they care little for the lives of murder victims and their families. Compared with foes of capital punishment, he said, Texans have a higher regard for the sanctity of life -- "of victims' lives, that is."

 In testimony before the Texas Legislature, Rosenthal has argued against providing state juries with the sentencing option of life without parole. Of the 38 states where the death penalty is legal, 35 offer that option. But the legislature rejected it in a close vote last year. Texas prisoners sentenced to life are eligible for parole after 40 years.

 To Rosenthal, a sentence of life without parole is an easy way out for squeamish juries seeking to sidestep a tough decision. "I'm not saying the decision shouldn't be difficult -- I think it should be difficult," he said.

 As for the handful of Texas politicians with doubts about the death penalty, they speak cautiously. One of them is Elliott Naishtat, a transplanted New Yorker who came to Texas as a VISTA volunteer in the 1960s. Naishtat, a member of the state House who represents central Austin -- possibly the state's most liberal district -- proposed a bill last year that would empower Texas's governor to impose a moratorium on executions pending a study of the soundness of the state's system. The bill did not make it to a floor vote. Even if it had, Naishtat acknowledged, no Texas governor interested in political survival would dare impose such a moratorium.

 He is planning to push the legislation in the session this winter.

 Despite Naishtat's evident qualms about capital punishment and his exceptional constituency in central Austin, he took pains in an interview to stress he wants merely to study the death penalty, not eliminate it.

 "You don't want to talk about instituting a state income tax or doing away with the death penalty," Naishtat said. "They're both considered -- no pun intended -- the kiss of death in Texas politics."

 ï¿½ 2002 The Washington Post