New Inmate to Join Texan Death Row After Almost a Year

               After ten months, the state of Texas has just gotten a new criminal on death row. 22-year-old Gabriel Hall has been sentenced to death after seven hours of deliberation by a Brazos County jury. The lifts a 10-month long hiatus of death sentences in the state of Texas. Gabriel Hall was sentenced to death by lethal injection. Studies have shown that death row sentences have definitely been slowing down since the 1990's. Today, there are 253 Texans listed on death row. Next to Texas, Oklahoma is the second most active state for capital punishment, having executed 112 inmates since they were able to. The capital punishment rate has decreased in Oklahoma over the years as well. There were 15 capital deaths in Oklahoma in 1998, but only two last year. Some say it's a national phenomenon, but the numbers say the national crime rate is decreasing as well.

                                                                      Gabriel Hall, 23
               Gabriel Hall is one of the most special supreme court cases for Texas this year, mostly because of the fact that it lifted a 10-month hiatus on death penalty charges. For Texas, it is incredible how long this grace period lasted. In the United States, the current state holder for most killed by capital punishment is Texas, with over 400 people killed, and over 300 people on death row. This is not surprising because Texas sort of seems like a country itself. The state has sort of built it's own culture unlike the rest of the U.S. Not to say that other states do not have unique cultures of their own, but that heavily relies on the region in which the state is located in. The state of Texas' culture, however, does not rely on its region. This mainly has to do with the states size and history. Texas takes up approximately 1/8th of the U.S (slightly bigger than France's amount of land), so it is safe to say that Texas can be classified as a region of its own. With these thoughts in mind, it can be predicted that Texas will not change their mind about the death penalty anytime soon.

               This relates to what we were talking about in class this week because we discussed the 8th amendment. The 8th amendment states that we are protected from excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment. The death penalty (as decided in the case "Gregg v. Georgia") is not classified as cruel and unusual punishment. Only if cruel and unusual forms of death that choose to discriminate against a group of people may the death penalty be deemed unconstitutional. The constitutional forms of the death penalty are legal injection, electrocution, gas chamber, and firing squad are legal in states where the death penalty is allowed. Some people like to say that gas chambers are discriminatory due to their use against Jewish people in World War II. This is a false argument because the gas chambers were not used on just Jewish people, thus not discriminating against jews, thus making gas chambers constitutional. Each method of killing a convicted criminal varies from state to state, but the most common method is lethal injection.