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What can Texas tell us about the rise and fall of the death penalty?
By the late 1960s, use of the death penalty was on the decline in the United States. But after the U.S. Supreme Court declared in the 1972 case
Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty as practiced violated the Eighth and 14th Amendments, there was a political backlash. By 1976, Georgia had a new capital punishment system that did pass Supreme Court muster, and other states followed suit including Texas.
In
Let The Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, the Marshall Project’s Maurice Chammah examines how Texas reinstated its death penalty, carrying out an execution by lethal injections in 1982 and quickly becoming the leader in the nation in number of executions.