HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) _ A study of the death penalty in Texas suggests that as many as 60 people may be alive today in the state because two dozen convicted killers were executed last year in the nation’s most active capital punishment state.
A review of executions and homicides over 12 years in Texas was conducted by criminologist Raymond Teske at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville and Duke University sociologists Kenneth Land and Hui Zheng. It concludes that a monthly decline of between one-half to 21/2 homicides follows each execution.
The study is the first to focus on monthly data in Texas. It was published in a recent issue of Criminology, a journal of the American Society of Criminology.