While the US is preaching protection of human rights to the world community, Texas - second-largest state in both area and population (behind Alaska) in the nation - has cultivated a deep passion for executing criminals and that too under the nose of the watchdog.
‘If you cannot curb the crime, just kill the criminal,’ seems to be the motto of the security services and the law enforcements in Texas, as the state reached a landmark in ruling death penalties.
In a recent verdict an appeals court pronounced the capital punishment to Johnny Ray Conner, 32, for the 1998 fatal shooting of Kathyanna Nguyen, a clerk, in a Houston convenience store. Though, federal judge in Houston ruled that Conner should receive a new trial, the appeals court overturning the decision eventually voiced the death sentence for Conner.
There is no point of debating the issue, whether Conner is innocent or guilty, anymore, as the court ruling after an extensive interrogation, of almost a decade, has already pronounced him dead. But the point to be discussed, which has attracted people across the world, is the rate death sentences in Texas, increasing thick and fast that any other state in the United States.
While the US has executed over 1,090 prisoners in all since 1976, on the other hand, Conner is the 400th death row convict to be executed, which is more than a third, since the capital punishment resurrected in Texas in 1982, says the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.
However, the number is not that much high, if compared to China and many other Arabian nations, but quite enough to provoke the European Union to expressed its concerns over the growing death penalties in the US in general and Texas in particular.
Why the death penalties are so high in Texas? Has crime in the southwestern state reached a new high? Or the security services have just failed to curb crime and maintain law and order in a nation where human rights are given top priority?
These are some of the questions that that have been raised, not only in America but all over the world, and need to be address. For other countries need to see what you practice and what you preach when it comes to human rights.
