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	From The Post In February, Texas executed a woman for the first time since the Civil War, Karla Faye Tucker. U.S. Catholic bishops asked Texas to stop its executions last year. From the AP Virginia executed its 13th prisoner of the year last week.

Jeff Emery, 39, was executed Tuesday evening for stabbing a Texas A&M student to death 19 years ago. (Texas Department of Corrections)

HUNTSVILLE, Tex., Dec. 8 – In a light rain, the hearse pulled up to Texas's oldest penitentiary, the red-brick Huntsville Unit. A guard waved it through the back gate, as usual, and the driver parked near the prison's bunker-like death house, beside a chain-link fence. As civilian witnesses waited to be escorted along an outdoor walkway to the death house, a tarpaulin covered the fence to ensure they would not see the hearse as they walked by.

"We have it down to a science," said Larry Todd, a prison spokesman.

Largely in the southern states, and with Texas leading the way, the U.S. death march goes on, moving at its fastest rate since the 1950s. From 1992, when the execution pace here began to accelerate, until the end of last week, 119 inmates had died of lethal injection in the Huntsville death chamber. The state with the next highest number of executions in that period is Virginia, with 45, including one last Thursday.

Texas has carried out the most executions by far since the Supreme Court approved restoration of the death penalty in 1976. No other state is close. Yet even by Texas standards, what is happening here this week is extraordinary.

Monday night, the hearse arrived for Daniel Lee Corwin, 40, a confessed serial killer. Tonight, it carried away Jeff Emery, 39, convicted of sexually assaulting and fatally stabbing a college student during a burglary. Wednesday, it will come for Danny Lee Barber, 43, also found guilty of murdering a burglary victim. And Thursday, it will arrive for Joseph Stanley Faulder, 61, a Canadian who was convicted of fatally beating and stabbing an elderly woman and who Canadian authorities say should be spared because he was not granted consular rights when he was arrested by Texas police.

Next Tuesday, the hearse is due again at the Huntsville death house, site of every Texas execution since 1924, when the state took control of executions from local sheriffs. After a break for the holidays, the hearse is set to return four more times in the first two weeks of January, including three nights in row, Jan. 11 to 13.

Although Texas leads the count, it is not alone. Since a Utah firing squad killed Gary Gilmore in January 1977, ending a 10-year death penalty hiatus nationwide, 439 people have been put to death in the United States, counting Jeff Emery tonight. Emery was the 163rd inmate to be executed here since 1982, when Texas carried out its first execution under a new death penalty statute approved by the Supreme Court in 1976.

Supporters and opponents of capital punishment can only theorize why Texas carries out death sentences with so little hesitation. Some say that the state's capital punishment laws are particularly straightforward and that Texas has remained insulated from appeals against other states' laws. They also say the state's courts and lawyers generally have been supportive of capital punishment, more so than lawyers and judges elsewhere. Gov. George W. Bush (R), among many Texas politicians, also backs the death penalty "as part of an effective criminal justice policy," a spokeswoman said.

Across the nation, 22 years after the Supreme Court reopened death house doors, opponents continue sounding a familiar refrain: The death penalty is morally wrong, unconstitutionally cruel, and impossible to apply fairly; blacks account for 13 percent of the country's population but more than 40 percent of its condemned inmates; and a murderer, regardless of race, is much more likely to be sentenced to death for killing a white victim than a nonwhite victim, and the sentence is more likely to be carried out.

Danny Lee Barber, 37, is next in line, scheduled to die Wednesday. (Texas Department of Correction)

On and on goes the debate, one side arguing that death sentences deter crime, the other asserting they do not.

The public approves of the ultimate punishment, or says it does. Polls in recent years have consistently found 70 to 80 percent of Americans in favor of capital punishment. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups opposed to the death penalty argue that the survey numbers are weak, that support for executions drops markedly when respondents are informed of what opponents say are inequities in the death penalty process.

The same polls also have shown a majority of black people supporting capital punishment.

In Texas, said Todd, the prison spokesman, "we have the drill down. We carry each execution with a much dignity as possible. When we do it, we do it right."

Monday night, when Daniel Lee Corwin's time came, Todd said, every official taking part in the process – the warden, the chaplain, the five-member "tie-down" team assigned to strap Corwin to the execution gurney, the two guards on "IV team" whose job was to insert the needles and start the chemicals flowing – all had been through it before.

"I'd never call it routine, when you're taking someone's life," said Todd. "But they're all professionals. They know what they're doing, step by step."

Corwin, a carpenter born in Orange County, Calif., was one of 446 men on death row at the Ellis Unit prison near Huntsville, until early Monday afternoon, when he was transported to the nearby death house. Only California, with 513 condemned prisoners as of Oct. 1, has a bigger death row than Texas, which runs a separate death row in another prison for seven condemned women.

In Huntsville, 75 miles north of Houston, Corwin was first led to a holding cell in the death house, at the opposite end of a short hallway from the execution chamber. Through the cell bars he could see a digital clock on a table against a wall, a few feet away. The afternoon ticked away.

He was fingerprinted. "To ensure we have the proper inmate," said Todd. "It's checks and balances."

About 4 p.m., Corwin had a final meal of steak, potatoes and peas, cake for dessert, washed down with root beer. He had the choice of dying in his white prison pants and pullover white tunic or blue work pants and a blue shirt. He opted for the work clothes.

Two guards and a chaplain stayed with him through the afternoon, seeing to his needs, as other prison officials came and went.

Corwin was white, like 37 percent of Texas's death row inmates. Blacks make up 42 percent, Hispanics 20 percent. Nationally, whites account for 47 percent of the 3,517 death row inmates, according to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-capital punishment group. Blacks make up 42 percent, Hispanics 8 percent.

In outlawing capital punishment in 1972, the Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia, found that death sentences were being meted out haphazardly, with little or no guidelines for what constituted capital murder. Minorities were receiving a grossly disproportionate share of those sentences. That was nowhere truer than in Texas, according to the authors of "The Rope, the Chair & the Needle," a statistical analysis of capital punishment here, published in 1994.

From 1924, when Texas fired up "Old Sparky," until 1964, when it pulled the plug, the state executed 361 inmates, 63 percent of whom were black, including five men put to death on the electric chair's inaugural night. The authors found that of the 510 defendants sentenced to death over that span, only 174 were white.

Texas was among more than a dozen states to pass new death penalty statutes within a few years of the Furman ruling, specifying circumstances under which death sentences can be imposed and detailing what jurors should consider in making up their minds.

The high court upheld the Texas law in 1976, along with new laws in Georgia and Florida. Today, West Virginia is the southernmost state without a death penalty. The others are Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Dakota, Vermont, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.

On Monday, Corwin walked to the death chamber with the warden, the chaplain and the five-member "tie-down" team at 6:04 p.m. A minute later he was strapped in place.

A pair of IV tubes from a separate room were run through an opening in the blue wall, the needles inserted in his right arm and left hand. The witnesses were summoned, led past the hidden hearse to the death house. They filed into two observation rooms to Corwin's right. In one were two friends of the condemned man; in the other, relatives of three women he killed for no sane reason.

The blinds were pulled open so the witnesses could see.

"I regret what happened and I want you to know I'm sorry," Corwin said into a microphone dangling over his head, before the chemicals flowed. "I just ask and hope that sometime down the line that you can forgive me. I think in a lot of ways that without that, it becomes very empty and hollow, and the only thing we have is hatred and anger."

At 6:33 p.m., he was pronounced dead, and wheeled out to the hearse.

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company

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