Even with death sentences across the country now at historic lows, most years Texas continues to execute and send more people to death row than any other state.
s grandfather particularly well, but stories of Billie Wayne Coble have cast a shadow over his family since before he was born. In August 1989, Billie murdered his estranged wife’s parents and brother. The slayings shocked Waco, and the Coble name continued to raise eyebrows as it surfaced in headlines about appeals in the case over the following three decades. Billie’s son from a previous marriage, Gordon Coble, was only a teenager when his father was sentenced to death.
Gordon remembers he was starting to fall into his son’s arms when he heard people, presumably prison officers, rushing toward the front of the witness room saying, “Get him.” He says he couldn’t see much after that because one of them pulled his coat over his head while dragging him outside. “I’m being dragged and flipped and my son’s going, ‘Dad, they just kicked me in the head,’ and I’m hollering, ‘Who? Who? What’s going on?’” he says. “I never even tried to fight them. I just went limp.
Gordon Coble and his wife Nelley Coble photographed at their home in Marble Falls, Texas, on Sunday, November 16, 2020., journalist Maurice Chammah ties Texas’ embrace of capital punishment to the state’s frontier mythos, citing politicians, prosecutors, and judges in Texas who pushed for bringing back the ultimate punishment and framed it as a regrettable necessity. Some death penalty supporters warned that Texans might take the law into their own hands without it.
Despite all efforts to make executions a somber, quiet, and orderly affair, emotions still come screaming to the surface. Chammah’s book details the 2001 execution of Gary Graham, whose professed innocence turned him into a cause célèbre in the anti-death penalty movement. Graham, who had vowed to fight his execution, had to be ripped from his cell when the time came. The tie-down team strapped Graham’s head to the gurney to keep him still.
Billie’s case dragged on for decades, in part because an appeals court granted him a new sentencing in 2008 due to an error in his initial trial. Billie’s attorneys argued that his behavior on death row proved that he would not be, as required for a death sentence in Texas, a continuing danger to prison staff and other prisoners if handed life without parole.
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