Why Houston Leads in Death Row Cases : City juries convicted 10% of those executed in U.S. since ’76. Tough prosecutor is cited as a key factor.

HOUSTON —  This is the city that gives Texas the distinction--dubious or otherwise--of being the nation’s leader in Death Row convictions.

Take away Houston and Texas would be somewhere in the middle of the 37 states that allow capital punishment. Of the 358 killers on Texas’ Death Row, 97 were convicted in Houston, as compared to 34 from the upstate metropolis of Dallas.

If Houston were a separate state, it would rank eighth in the number of criminals sent to Death Row.

Put another way, Houston juries have convicted more than 10% of all the people executed in the United States since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

So what is it about this city that makes it the death sentence capital of the nation?

The answer comes from a combination of factors that include a hard-charging prosecutor and a system, critics say, that leads to lawyers inexperienced in capital offenses being appointed to such cases.

There is also relatively little hand-wringing here any more about meting out the death penalty--because it has become so commonplace. For example, three people were executed by lethal injection in May at the Texas Death Row in Huntsville and nine are scheduled to die this month.

A key player in all this is Johnny Holmes, the Harris County district attorney who sports a handlebar mustache, a gift for the sound bite quote and the inclination to seek the death penalty in record numbers.

Holmes’ contention is that he is only doing his job and following the law. And the law says a person who kills someone during the commission of a felony should be given the death penalty. Holmes also said that he believes the public not only wants the death penalty, it wants convicted capital murderers put to death as quickly as possible rather than have them languish on Death Row for years during an appeals process.

“The biggest complaint I hear from the public is why does it take so long,” said Holmes. “Why are we (fiddling) around?”

Others complain that Holmes is merely using the death penalty to retain his popularity among the electorate.

“In his view, his political future depends on getting death penalties,” said Robert McGlasson of the Texas Resource Center, a federally funded organization that coordinates legal counsel for Death Row inmates. “It’s a phenomenon that exists nationwide in which he (Holmes) is an extreme. He uses the death penalty as a political tool.”

The other factor cited as a cause for so many death penalties here is the lack of a public defenders office. Stephen Bright, director of the Atlanta-based Center for Human Rights, said Houston is known as a place where judges appoint “inexperienced lawyers or some broken down old lawyer who is willing to take whatever crumbs the judge is willing to flip off the table.”

Such lawyers, said Bright and others, often have little or no criminal trial experience, though capital murder cases are extremely specialized with complicated rules of law.

“It’s like having a chiropractor do brain surgery,” he said.

Holmes dismissed such criticism as untrue and cited two well-publicized cases in which the court-appointed lawyers were former prosecutors. But McGlasson said some lawyers appointed to capital cases had the reputation of doing little pretrial preparation that would give their clients a better chance against a well-prepared prosecution.

That aside, death penalty opponents here wonder how even a well-intentioned court-appointed lawyer, with only limited funds, can compete with the state and all the investigative resources available to it.

“It’s tough to fight the state,” said Robert Morrow, a Houston lawyer who cited court-appointed capital murder cases as a major drain on small law firms because of the inordinate amount of time and resources needed to prepare an adequate defense.

(For capital cases, the pay for a lead lawyer is up to $600 per day. Trials typically last four to six weeks.)

Leigh Dingerson, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said creation of a public defender’s office is an obvious solution.

But, she asserted, “the public is much more enthusiastic about spending money on prosecutions and incarceration than making sure the accused gets a day in court.”