The thing that always struck me as remarkable about Texas (concerning the death penalty) is this. Texas obviously has the death penalty, and I think they execute more than any other state in the USA. They don't seem to have any problem with that. When confronted with the notion that, given the number of people executed, sometimes an innocent person might be executed, they respond citing their faith in due process, fair trial, and complete confidence in the juries who listened carefully to the evidence and rendered proper justice. That punishment is obviously irreversable.
On the other hand, Texas was the first state to put a limit on the amount of punitive damages that a jury could render in an injury case ($200,000 I believe). That is, if a company knowingly and wilfully engaged in behavior that rendered someone dead or seriously injured, the maximum amount of punitive damages they could face in Texas was $200,000. The idea was that Texas had to do something about these "runaway juries" that were giving verdicts that were just too much money. They needed a statute to limit how much justice a jury could serve in those cases.
So, you have a situation where the Texas juries are perfectly competent to hand out irreversable death penalty verdicts in criminal cases, but are perceived to be utterly incompetent when asked to determine how much money should be awarded in civil cases. Needless to say, it's doubtful that any criminal defendants have any lobbyists or political action committees in their corner.
