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TEXAS TRIBUNE – After the second shootout in Texas in one month, Governor Greg Abbott tweeted Monday night that "we are working on a legislative package right now" and that "accelerated executions for murderers would be an interesting addition".
The details, however, were rare. An Abbott spokesman said on Tuesday morning that he had not spoken to the governor since the tweet was published and that he no longer had immediate information. The Legislative Assembly will not meet until 2021. Abbott should convene an extraordinary session before passing a law – a decision he was reluctant to take after a shooting in El Paso last month.
Abbott's tweet was linked to an article by The Blaze about the US Department of Justice drafting a law to speed up the execution of people who commit mass murder; this article attributes the news to Bloomberg. In Texas, the average length of the death sentence is nearly 11 years, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. More than 200 people currently sentenced to death have been on average for nearly 16 years.
The process of appealing the death penalty in Texas is taking place in state and federal courts. Amanda Marzullo, executive director of Texas Defender Service, would be at the root of a lack of consistency and unequal justice system, said Amanda Marzullo, representative of the death penalty appellants and supporters of the reform of the capital punishment.
"Texas already has a much faster calling process than the rest of the country," she said. "Accelerating this process would only run the risk of new violations of the Constitution or an innocent person being executed."
Marzullo also said that the death penalty was in no way a deterrent against murder, let alone the mass attacks that caused the death of many killers.
Of the four highly anticipated mass shots in Texas in the last two years, two of the shooters were killed just after their attacks. Abbott's tweet arrived two days after an armed man killed seven people and wounded 22 others while he was passing through Odessa and Midland. The shooting ended when the police fired and killed the gunman.
An armed man in Sutherland Springs was killed in 2017 after leaving a church where he killed 26 people. The suspect of the El Paso shootings is currently in the county jail, but he said in a racist manifesto issued just before the massacre that he was expecting to be killed that day.
Following the El Paso shootings, Abbott convened a commission of lawmakers, activists, and law enforcement officials to discuss possible responses. The Texas Safety Commission held two meetings last month and Abbott said the group planned to issue a report with recommendations.
At last week's closed-door meeting, Abbott told a survivor of the El Paso shooting, which killed 22 people and injured more than two dozen, that he was not summoning them. legislators for a special session on gun violence. The survivor, Chris Grant, told The Texas Tribune that the governor had told him during the meeting that a special session was "a long process".
Abbott had tweeted earlier on Monday that the shooter at Saturday's shooting in Midland and Odessa had previously failed a weapons purchase background check and had not gone through a background check to buy the weapon used in the Saturday incident.
Abbott's tweet did not say why the shooter had not passed the background check or how he had obtained the rifle he had used to kill seven people and injure 22 others – including a soldier from the State and two policemen. The gunman died after a shootout with the police in front of a Midland movie theater. Abbott also cited the criminal history of the shooter.
"We need to keep guns out of the reach of criminals," he tweeted.
Emily Ramshaw contributed to the reports.
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