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, http://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 http://www.cdc.state.ca.us/.)
