Study shows Texas is sometimes soft on murderers

As showcased here and in this AP report, the Dallas Morning News has a remarkable new investigative report entitled “”Unequal Justice: Murderers on Probation.”  This first article in the paper’s five-part series starts this way:

The young man fights back during a robbery. Kill him. The neighbor accuses you of stealing gas from his truck. Kill him. The son you never wanted is yelling at your wife again. Kill him. Your punishment in Texas, the nation’s death-penalty capital? In each case, it was probation.

In many states, probation is a rare or impossible sentence for murder. But a Dallas Morning News investigation found that it happened in Texas at least 120 times from 2000 through 2006. And Dallas County easily leads the way. It put more than twice as many murderers on probation as it sent to death row.  Nine percent of all murder sentences in the county resulted in probation — that’s 47 people released to the streets.