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Texas sentencing is out of date: No one can predict future crimes, even on death row 

17 6
23.06.2024

The state of Texas plans to execute Ramiro Gonzales on June 26. Gonzales was sentenced to death in 2006 for kidnapping, sexually assaulting and fatally shooting 18-year-old Bridget Townsend five years earlier. At the time, Gonzales was also 18.

One of the key factors that led the jury to sentence Gonzales to death was testimony offered by psychiatrist Edward Gripon claiming, with certainty, that Gonzales would be a future danger. Gonzales’s case offers a striking illustration of the unreliability of predicting future dangerousness in capital cases, something even Gripon has come to recognize.

He testified pursuant to a 1973 Texas law that requires juries “to determine whether a defendant presents a future danger to society before imposing a death sentence.” Texas is the only state in the country with such a law.

This law has spawned an industry of experts who, like Gripon, make themselves available to testify for the state about future dangerousness. Gripson estimates he “testified in roughly 25 death penalty cases.” But he is far from the most infamous.

That distinction belongs to psychiatrist James Grigson. As a post from Vanderbilt Law School explains, “Grigson, nicknamed ‘Dr. Death,’ testified in over 150 capital murder trials for the prosecution in Texas and often stated that there was a 100 percent chance that capital murder defendants would kill again, despite never having personally examined them.”

Journalist Abbie VanSickle, writing in The Atlantic, notes that people like Grigson and Gripon had to tell the jury “whether there is a probability that........

© The Hill


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