Abolitionists Hand Gina Hinojosa a First-Day Plan to Stop Texas Executions — the Constitution Gives Her Less, and More, Than a Pen
The Execution Intervention Project used a Monday press conference to lay out, step by step, how a governor who opposes the death penalty could stop executions without the Legislature: 30-day reprieves for every date, a pardons board remade over time, and a veto for the money. Hinojosa's office has not taken the plan up in public.
Texas's next governor says she opposes the death penalty. On Monday, an abolitionist group told her, in public and in detail, exactly how they believe she can stop executions anyway. The Execution Intervention Project held a virtual press conference at 10 a.m. to present what it called a step-by-step plan for governor-elect Gina Hinojosa's first day in office, presented by its founder, the Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood.
"Governor-elect Hinojosa has said that she is opposed to the death penalty," Hood said in the project's release. "Now she holds power over the chamber that has killed more people than any other in the country. The only question that remains is whether she will follow her convictions and stop further executions." The release says Hinojosa declared her personal opposition most recently on CNN last month, and puts Texas's count at more than 600 executions since 1982.
The plan is candid about the limit at its center. Under the Texas Constitution, the Board of Pardons and Paroles has the first word on commutation: a governor can sign a recommendation to spare a life or refuse it, but cannot manufacture one. What a governor holds alone, the plan argues, is still considerable — one 30-day reprieve for each person who reaches an execution date, which Hood proposes she grant as a standing rule; the veto, over both new capital bills and the budget lines that fund executions; appointments, over time, to the seven-member pardons board and to the criminal-justice board whose agency buys the pentobarbital; and the ability to publish the execution protocol and to ask the pardons board, in public, to recommend life in every capital case, with a promise to sign each recommendation the hour it lands.
The clock behind the argument is specific. Hood, who says he has served as spiritual advisor at 14 executions across five states — most recently Jamaal Howard in Huntsville on Oct. 7 — is scheduled to be in the chamber again on Nov. 19, when Texas intends to execute Reinaldo Dennes, under the outgoing administration. Every date after the January inauguration, he argues, belongs to the new governor. Hinojosa's office has issued no public response taking up the plan in the material the project released Monday; what she does with the first execution date of her term is now a dated, public test.
