Abstract

Death and Texas

The article focuses on the justice system in Texas while discussing the case of Ernestina Rodriguez, a Texas resident, who lived with her husband and four little children, without plumbing or running water, a place patched together out of wood and corrugated metal for which they paid $200 a month rent. On February 11, 1998, her two-and-a-half-month-old son, Ramiro, stopped breathing. Now she is serving a life sentence at the Hobby Unit in Marlin, Texas, for knowingly, intentionally killing him by starvation. The presidential campaign in 2000 directed enough unwelcome light on the more outrageous features of the Texas criminal justice system that the state legislature spent a fair portion of its session this spring trying to make some face-saving adjustments.