Texas Prepares to Execute Fifth Inmate This Year

The Texas prison system continues to kill off the prisoners who came to death row in the 1990s, at the height of the death penalty’s popularity among juries. Officials plan to execute 60-year-old Garcia White on Oct. 1. He has been on the row since 1996.

White was sentenced to death for the murders of Bonita Edwards and her twin daughters, Bernette and Annette. He has lodged a series of appeals in his 28 years behind bars. In 2014, his attorney, Patrick McCann, was able to stop White’s scheduled execution the day before it was to have occurred, challenging the admissibility of White’s videotaped confession and arguing that a Houston detective manipulated his client’s intellectual disability to refuse his request for the presence of an attorney during his interrogation. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the appeal in 2016.

McCann argued again this August that White suffers from an intellectual disability, submitting a motion to withdraw the execution order and calling attention to the results of White’s IQ tests, which could be interpreted as making him ineligible for the death penalty. “Deficits were shown in the area of school, daily living, decision making, handling of money, and being able to understand and follow rules, including rules for safety at even simple jobs,” McCann wrote. “Deficits in the areas of reasoning, problem solving, abstract thinking, judgment, academic learning, and learning from experience were all confirmed.”

The CCA was unpersuaded by the arguments. They dismissed them in a written order on Sept. 18. If White is killed he will be the fifth person put to death this year, four of them Black or Hispanic.