McCord on Texas Death Sentences

David McCord  (Drake University Law School) has posted What's Messing with Texas Death Sentences? (Texas Tech Law Review, Vol. 43, 2011) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: 

This article empirically examines the causes of the substantial decline in the number of death sentences imposed in Texas from the peak period of 42 per year in the period 1992-1996 to 14 per year for the period 2005-2009. The author identifies five factors that have produced this decline, and quantifies their effects as either large or modest.