Texas Death Penalty Research Paper

At approximately 9:30PM on May 13, 1981, Bobby Grant Lambert was robbed and killed while walking out of a Safeway in Houston, Texas. The man who was convicted of this crime was an innocent African American by the name of Gary Graham, who was 17 years of age at the time. While there was no fingerprint or DNA evidence that linked Graham to the crime, he was still convicted of the crime due to claims of one out of five witnesses. All of the other four witnesses did not think it was Graham , but Bernadine Skillern was certain that it was him. She was the only witness at the trial and had made outrageous claims. Although she was in her car roughly 30-40ft away from the scene when she caught a slight glimpse of the assailant’s face, she claimed that she remembered his face very clearly. This, however, is very improbable because even if she were able to see anything clearly from that distance, it would be very unlikely for her to distinguish and remember a person’s face at night in a poorly lit parking lot. Unfortunately,

Texas is responsible for more than a third of the executions in the country and has more executions than California, which is more populated. As a result of their rash behavior towards capital punishment, over six innocent people have been sentenced to death and later released since 1987. Out of the 521 people who were executed, many of them could have been rehabilitated back into society, but weren’t given a chance. I also doubt that all 521 crimes were deserving of the death penalty and that many of them weren’t looked into as deeply as they should have been.
The death penalty is a very heavily debated upon topic, especially in the US. I am against capital punishment because it is expensive, targets minorities, and is abused in certain states. There are many alternatives that are less expensive and can keep innocent people from being executed for crimes they didn’t