Texas executes again
Arthur Brown, Jr. became the fifth person put to death in the state’s death chamber in 2023 and the 583rd since 1982—by far the most executions by any state since 1976 when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively reinstated the death penalty nationwide.
Brown was convicted, along with two other men, for killing four people and attempting to kill two others during a drug house rip-off in Houston in 1992. One of the other two men was executed in 2006 while the other is serving a life sentence.
It is often said that the death penalty deters murder. The 12 executions carried out by Texas in 1992 did not deter those four murders in the Houston drug house—or any of the other 2,239 murders committed across the state that year.
Texas does not execute people as a deterrent. It executes people, especially those of color, because it makes the state feel good.
Texas executed its first person—a white man—in 1819 for the crime of piracy—and it executed another 754 people up until 1964 at which time the state joined other states in a moratorium on the death penalty until the green light was given by the Supreme Court in 1976 to gin up the killing machines.
Texas has always preferred to experiment with black people on its new methods of execution.
The state legislature in 1923 put an end to hanging as the state’s method of execution and replaced it with the electric chair. That same year the infamous Huntsville prison was designated as the place where all executions would be carried out.
On February 8, 1924, Texas tested its new electric chair by executing five black men that day. The state did the same thing when it resumed executing people in 1982 by lethal injection with the execution of a black man.
Texas has always had a penchant for executing black men, especially those convicted of raping white women. Between 1819 and 1924 when the state was hanging people, the state hanged 29 black men for raping white women while executing just five white men for raping white women. No man was hanged for raping a black woman.
In fact, in 1919 a black dentist was lynched in Walker County just for associating with a white female work colleague.
Texans actually preferred unlawful lynching to legal hanging during the Civil War and well into and after the post-Civil War era.
In October 1862, the Great Hangings of Gainesville took place.
40 white men—all of whom were Unionist sympathizers or slavery abolitionists—were lynched and two others shot trying to escape in that small Cooke County community. It was the largest act of vigilante justice in America history. 19 of those men had been acquitted in court but were turned over to the lynch mob by the court anyway.
More people were lynched in Texas during the post-Civil War era (493) than were lawfully hanged by the state. The lynchings carried on well into the 20th century. For example, 9 black people were lynched in a single day in Walker County in 1908 and a decade later six members of a black family were lynched in 1919.
Today, a century later, Texas is still killing people.
The state has another execution scheduled this month and another next month. There are roughly another 183 people on death row awaiting their death date.