Texas takes pride in its perception of being a God-fearing state. It also takes pride in its law-and-order image, sporting bona fides as the State with the most executions since 1976, when the nation’s moratorium on the death penalty came…
Category: Death Penalty
June30
2024
2024
Posted By: John Floyd
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
If a jury convicts a defendant of capital murder in Texas, state law requires the trial court to conduct a separate sentencing proceeding before that same jury. This proceeding is generally referred to as the “sentencing phase” of the trial.…
Feb.19
2024
2024
Posted By: John Floyd
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
On January 25, 2024, Kenneth Eugene Smith became the first person to be executed by a state government in this country through a method known as nitrogen hypoxia. Officials at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama at…
Nov.19
2023
2023
Posted By: John Floyd
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
What the State…
Oct.01
2023
2023
Posted By: John Floyd
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
Who to believe, DNA evidence or third party confession?
At 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, November 21, 2013, the State of Oklahoma executed Anthony Castillo Sanchez in its death house at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. It marked the tenth…
Jan.13
2023
2023
Posted By: John Floyd
Category: Appeals | Criminal Law | Death Penalty
This past November, we posted a blog about the death penalty conviction of Ariel Escobar, who was sitting on Texas’ death row at the time, awaiting execution.
Escobar was convicted for the May 31, 2009, rape and murder of 17-year-old…
Nov.17
2022
2022
On November 14, 2022, Taylor Renee Parker became the seventh woman to arrive on Texas’ death row. The 29-year-old Parker was convicted on October 4, 2022, of capital murder by a Bowie County jury. On November 9, 2022, the jury …
Nov.15
2022
2022
Posted By: John Floyd
Category: Capital Crimes | Criminal Law | Death Penalty
On November 9, 2022, the State of Texas executed 61-year-old Tracy Lane Beatty. He was the 577th person put to death by lethal injection in this State since 1982. Scores of these individuals were executed despite highly credible evidence of…
Nov.06
2022
2022
Posted By: John Floyd
Category: Death Penalty
On May 31, 2009, 17-year-old Bianca Maldonado was found dead in an Austin, Texas, apartment she shared with her mother and sister. She had been stabbed 43 times and cut 30 times with two different sharp instruments. Her infant son…
Aug.07
2022
2022
Posted By: John Floyd
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
On July 29, 2022, Joe Nathan Jones, Jr. was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m. in the death chamber at a prison in southern Alabama. Media witnesses said that before the death pronouncement was made, Jones lay motionless on the death…
Take the first step toward protecting your freedom by contacting us now: