By KERA News & Wire Services
Dallas, TX –
The Fort Hood shooting suspect will be evaluated next month to determine his mental status that day and whether he's competent to stand trial, his attorney says.
Attorney John Galligan says prosecutors notified him that a three-person board of medical professionals has been named and will start reviewing documents in the case. He says that after the board finishes by Feb. 7, members will evaluate Maj. Nidal Hasan.
Galligan declined to release the names of the board members, who will report their findings to military prosecutors.
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in the Nov. 5 shootings on the Texas Army post.
Fort Hood officials did not immediately return calls Wednesday.
Bowling industry unites under one roof in Texas
Add bowling to the busy sports mix in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Arlington.
The home of the NFL's Dallas Cowboys and baseball's Texas Rangers will soon be the epicenter of the bowling industry. The International Bowling Campus will house a multitude of the sport's organizations, including the U.S. Bowling Congress and the Bowling Proprieters Association of America.
The International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame is moving from Missouri. The 100,000-square-foot facility will be near Cowboys Stadium, Rangers Ballpark in Arlington and the Six Flags amusement park.
U.S. Bowling Congress Executive Director Stu Upson calls the facility "a thrilling new era for bowling."
The campus is set to open Jan. 25.
Study: Death penalty in Texas a homicide deterrent
A study of the death penalty in Texas suggests that as many as 60 people may be alive today in the state because two dozen convicted killers were executed last year in the nation's most active capital punishment state.
A review of executions and homicides over 12 years in Texas was conducted by criminologist Raymond Teske at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville and Duke University sociologists Kenneth Land and Hui Zheng. It concludes that a monthly decline of between one-half to 2 1/2 homicides follows each execution.
The study is the first to focus on monthly data in Texas. It was published in a recent issue of Criminology, a journal of the American Society of Criminology.