ABSTRACT
The State of Texas executed Odell Barnes on March 1, 2000. Except for a smattering of news briefs in big-city dailies, his death went largely unnoticed in the United States. At first glance, Odell’s case offered nothing unusual to a public already numbed by the pace of lethal injections in the Lone Star state, which had already dispatched 208 inmates since the death penalty was reinstated there in 1976. Odell would be but one of forty death row inmates executed in the year 2000, an average of one every nine days.
