Michael Espinoza
Dr. Christopher Akujuobi
Texas Government
March 5, 2015
The Death Penalty in Texas
In the state of Texas the death penalty is the maximum punishment that a person can get for committing a crime. The death penalty originated in 1923, the method used to execute people was electrocution. The way that electrocution worked back in the day, is the victim was strapped to a chair with belts that tie him around the chair. Afterwards, the person is shocked from around 100 volts of electricity to 2000 volts of electricity. The person dies from their heart stopping or by electrocution. The death penalty was re-enacted in 1973, and reinstated in 1976 in Texas. The state changed the way that people were executed from electrocution to a different…show more content… Anthony Champagne says that “Texas executed 472 people from December 7, 1982, through July 21, 2012” (297). The way to receive the death sentence in Texas is by murdering a child under the age of six, murdering a fireman, murdering a police officer, and murdering a lot of people. Committing one of these crimes gets a person the death sentence in Texas. People convicted for these crimes do not automatically get executed. The person first spends time in jail until the day that they were sentenced to be executed. This is known as death row, in other words time in jail before execution. Some people spend more time on death row than others. It is said that some people do not even spend a year before execution and some people spend more than ten years before execution. The amount of time a person spends in jail before execution depends on the…show more content… The Death Penalty Information Center states that “Each death penalty case in Texas costs taxpayers about $2.3 million” (1). That is a large amount of money to pay for a task that takes about one minute to perform. It also costs as much as three times more than incarcerating someone for forty years. Unlike men, there have also been women that have been issued the death sentence in Texas. A person by the name of Karla Faye Tucker was also sentenced to execution. Edward J. Harpham states that, “She was also attractive and articulate and was the first woman in modern times condemned to be executed in Texas” (298). This goes to show that both genders are treated equally in the eyes of the