By S.M. | NEW YORK
TEXAS’S DEATH-PENALTY machinery is humming. Last year, the state carried out more than half of America’s executions. So far this year, six out of 15 have been carried out in the state and that share will increase. A further nine inmates on death row are slated to die in Texas in 2019. After the execution set for September 25th of Robert Sparks—who in 2007 confessed to fatally stabbing his wife and two step-sons and raping his step-daughters—four executions are scheduled for October, three for November and one in December.
On November 20th it will be the turn of Rodney Reed, a 51-year-old black man who was found guilty of killing Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old white woman, in 1996. Mr Reed has been on Texas’s crowded death row since 1998. At the trial, the main evidence connecting Mr Reed to the crime was strands of his DNA found inside Ms Stites’s body. Mr Reed said he had been having an affair with Ms Stites at the time of her death—and that he had sex with her the day before she was found strangled with her own woven leather belt on the side of a country road in Bastrop County, Texas.
