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.”
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.
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?
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
