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HOUSTON — A Harvard Law School study reports that racial bias, over-aggressive prosecutions and inadequate representation for poor defendants plagues Harris County’s handling of death penalty cases.

Juries in Harris County, where Houston is, have imposed the death penalty more than any other county in the U.S. since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty, though the report by the school’s Fair Punishment Project notes that the number of death sentences has fallen from 53 in 1998 through 2003 to 10 since 2010.

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Harris County was named one of 16 “outlier” counties in the U.S. where five or more death sentences were assessed in 2010-15. In the eight counties examined by the study, 41 per cent of the death sentences were given to black defendants and 69 per cent to minorities overall. In Harris County, all defendants condemned since 2004 are from minorities.

The death penalty is only appropriate for the worst of the worst

“When you look at what the death penalty actually looks like on the ground in Harris County, you see things that should disturb you. There’s a pattern of overzealous prosecution that dates back for decades but is still present in the time period for the study, and is matched by under-zealous (defence) representation in cases,” Rob Smith, one of the researchers on the project, told the Houston Chronicle.