You just can’t make this shit up. Quentin Jones was convicted of killing his great aunt. He was a suspect in two additional robbery murders (also capital crimes). Texas juries are asked to consider a defendant’s capacity for future dangerousness in applying the death penalty. Watch for the bait and switch in the article.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/texas-may-first-execution-10-150500265.html

The American Psychiatric Association, the nation’s largest psychiatric organization, has filed briefs to the Supreme Court arguing that the “unreliability of psychiatric predictions of long-term future dangerousness is by now an established fact within the profession.”

Flip the coin over. It stands to reason that predictions of reform, or turning over a new leaf are also unreliable. Texas juries are not asked to make a diagnosis. They are asked to decide based on prior behavior of the defendant would you invite him to Thanksgiving dinner and hand him a carving knife? If liberals had their way a parent lacking a degree in thermodynamics is not qualified to tell a two year old, “the stove is hot!”

When it comes to the death penalty any technicality is acceptable. When it comes to counting ballots, a technicality is nothing more than a con job.

Jones was sentenced to death. His confinement for the last twenty-one years was not punishment. Let the punishment fit the crime. I still maintain that Texas doesn’t need pharmaceutical companies to provide a means to an end. Used to be condemned inmates got to choose a last meal. That has gone out of fashion. I propose a variation on the theme. Hit the evidence room at Texas Department of Public Safety. Let the inmate decide, a little cocaine, a touch of fentanyl with a methamphetamine kicker. The condemned would get to leave death row in much the same way that he arrived.