More than any other place in the United States, Huntsville is the capital of capital punishment. All of the 515 men and women Texas has executed since 1982 by lethal injection and all of the 361 inmates it electrocuted from 1924 to 1964 were killed here in the same prison in the same town, at the red-brick Walls Unit. Texas accounts for nearly 40 percent of the nation’s executions.
In Huntsville, a city of 40,000 that cuts through pine forests along Interstate 45, the Walls prison sits like a fortress in the heart of town, roughly half a mile from City Hall, the county courthouse and the campus of Sam Houston State University. Huntsville is part college town, part prison town — there are seven state prisons, including Walls, in the Huntsville area, as well as the headquarters of the state prison agency, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
But many residents do not dwell on the pace of executions. “Unless the high-profile cases are going on, you don’t really know until you read about it the next day in the paper or you hear it on the news that an execution was going on,” said Heike Ness, 48, an insurance agent.
On Monday, an appeal by Mr. Campbell’s lawyers to stop the execution reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. The lawyers cited the “horrifically botched” execution in Oklahoma, where Clayton D. Lockett writhed and moaned on the table until prison officials halted the procedure. Mr. Lockett died 43 minutes after the delivery of drugs into a vein in his groin began. Oklahoma has declared a six-month stay of the next execution.
The lawyers focused on efforts by states to restrict information about the source of lethal drugs, arguing that “secrecy” is the “common denominator” between Oklahoma and Texas.
Texas has declined to disclose how its drug is tested for potency and purity.
State officials say that Texas is not like Oklahoma partly because it uses a single drug, the barbiturate pentobarbital, instead of the three-drug series employed north of the Red River. This approach, along with other protections for prisoners in the process, was favored by a new report on the death penalty from The Constitution Project, a group that includes supporters and opponents of capital punishment.
She added, “There’s nothing that says we can’t trust Oklahoma, but we can trust Texas.” The risks of mistakes, she said, “are exponentially greater when executions are carried out in secret.” In fact, she noted, Oklahoma’s publicly available protocol is far more detailed than the one provided upon request from Texas.
Opponents of the death penalty question Texas’ reputation. Austin D. Sarat, an Amherst College professor who has studied the death penalty, put the state’s rate of mishaps at about 4 percent, slightly higher than Oklahoma’s, if difficulty in finding a vein is included in the calculation.
Support for the death penalty in Texas runs higher than in the rest of the country; in a May 2012 University of Texas-Texas Tribune online poll, 53 percent of Texas voters said they supported the death penalty for murder over life imprisonment without the chance for parole. A Quinnipiac University telephone poll conducted in May 2013 found that 48 percent of American voters favored the death penalty over a life term for people convicted of murder.
Part of the reluctance to sentence people to death springs from the more than 140 high-profile exonerations in the state in recent years, including a dozen death row inmates; there have also been questions about the guilt of some executed prisoners. The State Legislature allowed juries to impose sentences of life without parole for capital crimes in 2005.
One person who has no qualms about seeing Mr. Campbell die is Israel Santana, a cousin of Alexandra Rendon, Mr. Campbell’s victim. Mr. Santana is a criminal defense lawyer in Houston and has defended people on capital murder charges.