Texas’ Death Row Web Site Reveals ‘Ghoulish’ Details

Charles Henry Rector ordered three beef enchiladas, three tacos, French fries and a strawberry shake. Syed Mohmed Rabbani is from Bangladesh. William Prince Davis’ last four words were “What about those Cowboys?”

Just as Texas executes more inmates than any of the other 37 states with the death penalty, its 2-year-old Web site offers the most--and, often, the most chilling--details about the men and women killed by the state and the process used to do so.

Who was on death row the longest? Excell White. How long? 8,982 days.

What does it cost to house a death row offender? $49.54 per day. What does it cost to lethally inject an inmate? $86.08 for the three chemicals. How long does it take? Seven minutes.

With Texas Gov. George W. Bush running for president, there is national interest, mainly among the press corps, in the state’s frequent executions and the more than 400 inmates currently on death row.

Glen Castlebury, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s director of public information, said that he and his two colleagues receive 60 calls a day from reporters. Even more would call, he said, if there were no Web site.

“I would agree it is ghoulish,” Castlebury said, “but there is a ghoulish demand out there in the media for such [information], and it was easier to put that bizarre stuff out on the Web than to clog my office with calls about it.”

Indeed, just about every death row statistic, detail and trivial fact a reporter would need for an article is on the Web site, https://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/.

A Precise, Final Record

No doubt, the site is getting visitors this week as Texas prepares to execute two inmates, Orien Joiner and Caruthers Alexander, today.

Killing a convicted prisoner is carried out in meticulous detail. Nearly every minute is logged. So to publish online, with every “um” and “y’all,” what 223 inmates said at their last moments or what they ate hours before takes almost no extra effort. It’s already in a file cabinet somewhere, and it’s all public information.

But just because the information is available, does that mean it belongs on the Internet? Many states apparently think so--California has photos of its execution chamber--but none seems to believe so firmly in full disclosure as Texas. (The California site is https://www.cdc.state.ca.us/.)

“What we really try to do is expedite the process that people have to go through, particularly reporters, to get information,” said the site’s Webmaster, Andrew Davis. “It was put up to make people’s lives easier, but it still gets interpreted negatively.”

Growing Interest in Site

Davis said traffic to the site has jumped dramatically since national reporters began perking up every time Texas planned an execution. In June, the Web site received 2.2 million “hits,” 258,000 on June 22, the day of the high-profile execution of Gary Graham.

Critics of the death penalty have a hard time disagreeing with the Web site’s exhaustive detail. The Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment, links to the Texas site from its own Web page.

Being able to see summaries of the cases that put Texas’ inmates on death row “personalizes it a little bit,” center director Richard Dieter said. “It’s not simply a number. They have a picture of the person--usually not the most sympathetic picture--but anyhow there’s some realization that you’re dealing with a person here.”

Still, Dieter said, when the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said public support for the death penalty would be lower if people knew more about the process, “what he was talking about was all the failures of society that led up to this tragedy. I don’t think he was talking about the meals and the last words and the mug shots.”