Jan, 13, Rick Halperin, director of the SMD Dallas Human Rights Program, for a piece that condemns capital punishment and the practice of lethal injection in Texas and elsewhere. Published in Texas Monthly Magazine under the heading Lethal Injection Was Once Considered a “Less Barbaric” Form of Execution: https://tinyurl.com/hphv5j27
More than 40 ago, during the first week of December in 1982, the U.S. executed its first prisoner using lethal injection. On December 7 of that year, six years after the death penalty was revalidated by the Supreme Court, Charles Brooks Jr., who had been convicted of murder, was executed in Huntsville, here in Texas. To date, 1,380 others have been executed via lethal injection, comprising nearly 90 percent of all death row executions. In 2023, eight more Texans will be executed by injection.
Just days ago, on January 10, Robert Fratta, who was sentenced for hiring two men to kill his estranged wife, was put to death in Texas’s first execution of 2023. He was part of a lawsuit brought with three other inmates alleging that the execution drugs used in Texas are long past their expiration dates, thus forcing the condemned to suffer inhumane and painful executions. Texas courts have consistently rejected all such inmate claims, despite a history of botched and painful executions in this state, and they let Fratta’s execution proceed.