Will Speer Found Hope Enough to Share on Texas’s Death Row
He’s one of the first faith-based coordinators for Texas inmates facing the death penalty. He’s scheduled to be executed this week.
He’s one of the first faith-based coordinators for Texas inmates facing the death penalty. He’s scheduled to be executed this week.
Pamela Colloff reflects on her 2010 story about the shoddy police work and prosecutorial misconduct that put an innocent man on death row.
The wild times of a gentle roughneck who beat the Texas criminal-justice system.
Jim McCloskey, the godfather of the innocence movement, changed the way we think about crime and punishment.
A.P. Merillat helped send at least 15 people to death row. On Wednesday, Travis Runnels will become the third this year to be executed, even though a former prison official calls Merillat’s testimony “bullshit.”
The case, which has attracted huge amounts of attention, will go back to the trial court.
Rodney Reed has been on Texas’ death row for 21 years, but new evidence and witnesses have drawn national attention ahead of his upcoming execution date.
There’s something dishonest in the state’s bureaucratic approach to killing its own citizens.
Brandley died last week, 31 years after the state of Texas tried and failed to kill him.
The Associated Press reporter discusses his 17,000 days on the job in our Reporter podcast.
Kerry Max Cook, who spent almost twenty years on death row for a murder he maintains he didn't commit, sues the people who sent him there.
The Supreme Court says Texas must change the way it determines who can be executed.
Op-ed: Jeffrey Wood was sentenced to death under the Texas law of parties. But should someone who didn’t pull the trigger be executed?
A death penalty in decline.
With the increased difficulty of maintaining a pentobarbital supply, Texas and Arizona are accused of importing an unapproved drug.
The personal life of the slain sheriff’s deputy is no one’s business, but it could be important to his alleged killer's defense.
Another roadblock appears to be in place as Texas’s supply continues to dwindle.
Max Soffar is dying on death row, where he sits for a crime I'm certain he didn't commit. Maybe this letter will convince you to let him spend his last days at home with his family.
For more than a decade, Michelle Lyons’s job required her to watch condemned criminals be put to death. After 278 executions, she won't ever be the same.
As the drugs used in lethal injections become more difficult to come by, one state lawmaker in Utah is proposing an old-school replacement: The firing squad. Should Texas consider a similar move?
Why I decided to watch my father’s killer die.
The state, the prisoners who face execution, the attorneys who represent them, and the courts have a lot to figure out, and not a lot of time to do it.
A Houston judge threw out the lawsuit against the state by three death row inmates who claimed that Texas was planning to kill them using unknown and untested drugs, so they're taking it to a higher court.
A small group of committed protesters show up to nearly every execution in Huntsville to exercise their civil rights in what has become a sort of ritual.
According to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated Press, Texas is down to its last eight vials of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital—and the Houston-area "compounding pharmacy" that made them wants them back. What happens when the state runs out?
During my years as a district attorney, I have sought the death penalty. But does the state need to take a life to make a point?
UPDATED: A Brownsville construction worker named Manuel Velez was sent to death row in 2008 after he was convicted of killing his girlfriend’s baby. Five years later, new testimony from a number of forensic experts suggests that the medical evidence against Velez was deeply flawed. Now he may receive the
Ramon Hernandez, put to death for a 2001 slaying, was also linked to three other murders, prosecutors said.
Jonathan Green was put to death Wednesday for the 2000 murder of a 12-year-old girl, but his lawyers maintained until the end that their client was mentally ill and thus unsuitable for execution.
Marvin Wilson, an inmate with an IQ of 61 and the reasoning skills of a grade school student, was the latest to die in the Huntsville death chamber.
Jesse Joe Hernandez, who was pronounced dead on Wednesday night at 6:18 p.m., had beaten a 10-month-old baby to death in 2001.
The German auteur Werner Herzog interviews prisoners on death row in Texas and Florida for his gripping new television series.
Texas plans to execute Keith Thurmond Wednesday night for the 2001 murders of his estranged wife and her new boyfriend.
Ernest Willis spent seventeen years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. And he has a few things to say about the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for a strangely similar crime that many experts believe he didn’t commit either.
Michael Hall’s exclusive interview with Ernest Willis.
Freedom for Earnest Willis?
Rodrigo Hernandez, who was convicted of the rape and murder of Susan Verstegen, a 38-year-old single mother and Frito-Lay employee, is set to die.
Someone killed Melissa Trotter and dumped her body in the Sam Houston National Forest. But according to six forensic experts, that someone was not Larry Swearingen.
In 1994 the president of Grapeland High’s senior class committed a brutal, senseless murder. Now he’s on death row, waiting for the courts to decide his fate.
There’s something romantic about a jailbreak, even when the escapee is a cold-blooded killer on death row. That’s why our feelings about Martin Gurule were more than a little complicated.
Kenneth McDuff is just one among hundreds of violent criminals who never should have been paroled—but they were.
Charlie Brooks was the first man to die by lethal injection, but everyone wondered whether he or his partner was the real murderer. In his last days, Brooks answered that, and other questions.