The Texas judiciary comprises the supreme court, the state court of criminal appeals, 14 courts of appeals, and more than 380 district courts.
The highest court is the supreme court, consisting of a chief justice and eight justices, who are popularly elected to staggered six-year terms. The court of criminal appeals, which has final jurisdiction in most criminal cases, consists of a presiding judge and eight judges, also elected to staggered six-year terms.
Justices of the courts of appeals, numbering 80 in 1999, are elected to six-year terms and sit in 14 judicial districts; each court has a chief justice and at least two associate justices. There were 27 district court judges in 1999, each elected to a four-year term. County, justice of the peace, and municipal courts handle local matters.
As of June 2001, there were 164,465 offenders incarcerated within the Texas Department of Criminal Justice facilities, an decrease of 2.2% from the previous year. The state's incarceration rate stood at 731 per 100,000 inhabitants. According to the FBI Crime Index, Texas had a 2001 total crime rate of 5,152.7 per 100,000 population, including a total of 122,155 violent crimes and 976,654 crimes against property in that year. Texas criminal law provides for capital punishment by lethal intravenous injection for certain violent crimes. Between 1977 and 2003, 306 persons were executed in Texas, by far the highest number in the nation. As of 2003, there were 454 inmates under sentence of death.