The NY Times reports today on an interesting study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies that concludes that Texas, generally thought to be the death penalty capital of the U.S., actually sentences a smaller percentage of people convicted of murder to death than the national average because the conventional view fails to take into account the large number of murders in Texas.

“Texas’ reputation as a death-prone state should rest on its many murders and on its willingness to execute death-sentenced inmates,” wrote the authors of the study, “It should not rest on the false belief that Texas has a high rate of sentencing convicted murderers to death.”

As a percentage of murders, Nevada and Oklahoma impose the most death sentences, at 6 and 5.1 percent. In Texas, the percentage is 2 percent. The rate in Virginia, another state noted for its commitment to capital punishment, is 1.3 percent. The national average is 2.5 percent; the median is 2 percent.
Using the same analysis, the study concluded that blacks are actually underrepresented on the nation’s death row in that blacks commit 51.5 percent of all murders nationally, but only comprise 42 percent of death row inmates.