After the second Texas mass shooting in a month, Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted Monday night that "we're working on a legislative package right now" and that "expedited executions for mass murderers would be a nice addition."
Details, however, were scarce. A spokesman for Abbott said Tuesday morning that he hadn't spoken to the governor since the tweet was posted and had no more immediate information. The Legislature doesn't convene again until 2021. Abbott would need to call a special session to pass legislation before then — a move he showed reluctance to make after a mass shooting in El Paso last month.
Abbott's tweet linked to an article in The Blazeon the U.S. Department of Justice drafting legislation to speed up executions of people who commit mass murder; that article attributed the news to Bloomberg. In Texas, the average time spent on death row is almost 11 years, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The more than 200 people currently on death row have been there an average of nearly 16 years.
Of Texas' four high-profile mass shootings in the last two years, two of the shooters were killed in the immediate aftermath of their attacks. The Odessa and Midland shooting ended when police shot and killed the gunman, and the Sutherland Springs gunman in 2017 killed himself after leaving the church where he killed 26 people. The Sutherland Springs shooter was also shot by bystander who saw him leaving the church.
The suspect in the El Paso shooting is currently in county jail, but he said in a racist manifesto published just before the massacre that he expected to be killed that day.
In the aftermath of the El Paso shooting, Abbott convened a commission of lawmakers, activists and law enforcement to discuss possible responses. The Texas Safety Commission held two meetings last month and Abbott indicated that the group plans to issue a report with recommendations.
During last week's closed-door meeting, Abbott told a survivor of the El Paso shooting, which left 22 dead and more than two dozen wounded, that he wasn’t calling lawmakers back for a special session to address gun violence. The survivor, Chris Grant, told The Texas Tribune that the governor told him during the meeting that a special session is “a long process,”
Abbott tweeted earlier Monday that the gunman in Saturday's mass shooting in Midland and Odessa had previously failed a gun purchase background check and did not go through a background check to buy the gun used in Saturday's incident.
Abbott's tweet did not say why the shooter didn't pass the background check or how he obtained the rifle he used to kill seven people and injure 22 others — including a state trooper and two police officers. The gunman died after a shootout with police outside a Midland movie theater. Abbott also cited the shooter's criminal history.
"We must keep guns out of criminals' hands," he tweeted.
Emily Ramshaw contributed reporting.
The Texas Tribune provided this story.
