I did look for supporting research, etc before posting, but none of what I found went back far enough to cover the period in question. Most goes back only to the mid-90s, when violent crime in Texas had peaked and started to decline. We came here in the late 70s.

Another factor that makes an apples-to-apples analysis challenging is that Texas didn't just re-instate the death penalty. They fully committed and passed a number of legislative measures to limit death penalty appeals and to reduce the amount of time spent on death row before execution.

The result was that for a decade or so, Texas actually executed a lot more convicted murderers, aggravated kidnappers, cop killers, etc compared with neighboring states. Comparing the number of death sentences doesn't really tell the whole story.

I was called for jury duty on a trial where a man had abducted two kids, killed them, and killed a state trooper ... allegedly. Chilling.

One thing that's not in question is that execution does cut WAY down on recidivism. IMHO once someone crosses that line, they're not coming back to the "human" side.