Will Texas execute more than a dozen prisoners in the first quarter of 2009?

Though not quite as eye-popping as this other Texas death row story, anyone who seriously studies the administration of capital punishment should be closely following the fact, as reported in this AP piece, that Texas is scheduled to execute a remarkable number of prisoners over the next few months:

Texas is wasting little time this new year claiming its annual notoriety as the nation's most active capital punishment state. Convicted killer Curtis Moore, condemned for the slayings of three people during a drug-ripoff robbery in 1995 in Fort Worth, is set for lethal injection this week in what would be the first execution in the United States in 2009.

It's the first of eight scheduled punishments this month in the U.S., all but two of them in Texas. The 18 prisoners put to death in Texas last year accounted for about half of the 37 executions carried out in the country. Since the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 allowed capital punishment to resume, 423 Texas inmates have been put to death. Virginia was next with 102.

Moore, 40, was set to die Wednesday. Two more executions are set for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit next week, then three more the following week. The six Texas inmates set to die in January are among at least 14 with execution dates already this year. Three more are set to die in early February, four in March and another in April....

In Texas, where a record 40 prisoners were put to death in 2000, execution dates are set by trial court judges from the county where the prisoner was convicted. For inmates now with scheduled dates, legal appeals either are exhausted or in the final stages in appeals courts.

Some recent related posts:

• What might 2009 have in store for . . . the death penalty in the US?
• DPIC releases year-end report on state of death penalty in 2008
• The decline of death even in Texas!
• Notable second-term Presidential execution realities
• As goes Maryland, so goes the nation on capital punishment?
• More evidence that the death penalty is dying a slow death on the front lines
• Effective media coverage of capital punishment realities in China (but not of federal capital realities)
• What might a new administration mean for the federal death penalty?
• An effective review of the state of debate over the death penalty