Texas
Fewer Texans sentenced to death, executed amid “evolving standards of decency”
:focal(0x0:3000x2000)/static.texastribune.org/media/files/5cefaa61ded534ac5bff3d0a24773412/1017%20Roberson%20Huntsville%20MF%2006.jpg?ssl=1 "Fewer Texans sentenced to death, executed amid “evolving standards of decency”")
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In 1982, Texas was the first in the world to execute an inmate by lethal injection, its first execution since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Quickly, the state became the United States’ top executioner and is among the top three in imposing death sentences.
At the turn of the century in 2000, the population on Texas’ death row reached a record high of 459 inmates and officials carried out 40 executions, the most in a single year. Decades later, the state’s interest in capital punishment appears to have cooled, according to available data, influenced by cultural shifts, legal updates and what some experts have called “evolving standards of decency.”
In 2022, the death row population dropped to under 200 inmates for the first time in almost three decades, and by the start of 2025, there were 174 people on Texas’ death row. Still, Texas has executed more people than the next four states combined since 1982, a trend largely upheld by a few urban counties — the top three of which are responsible for more than 40% of the state’s executions.
“The death penalty is no longer an American story, it’s really a local story,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “It’s about which local jurisdictions are using it, and those decisions that are being made by their local elected officials.”
Five men were executed by Texas in 2024, the sixth year in a row in which there were less than 10 executions. A little more than half of those sentenced to death in Texas — almost 600 of more than 1,100 inmates — have been executed since 1977. Since 2020, almost as many people on death row in the state have had their sentences reduced or convictions overturned as those executed, with 24 executions and 22 sentence reductions, most due to intellectual disability. Nine men also have died on death row before their execution date since 2020.
The slowdown in death sentences isn’t something that can be attributed to one thing but rather a buildup of legal and social factors, said Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a grassroots advocacy group whose focus is on death penalty education and abolition.
One of the most significant reasons for the decline was the state adopted life sentences without parole as an option to capital punishment in 2005. Texas was the last state with the death penalty to do so, according to the coalition’s 2024 report.
“That has given prosecutors and juries more discretion in terms of how they handle capital cases,” Houlé Cuellar said. “So what we’ve seen is that in the vast majority — and by vast majority, I would say 99-point-something-percent of capital cases — prosecutors in Texas are not pursuing the death penalty as a sentencing option.”
The financial costs of a death sentence to counties is also a factor prosecutors, specifically in rural counties, must consider when seeking the death penalty.
After the capital murder trials of three men who dragged James Byrd Jr., a Black man, for 3 miles and left his body outside an African American church in 1998, Jasper County was forced to raise its property taxes by more than 8% because of the cost to the county — $1.1 million of its $10 million budget. Two of the three men, who were self-admitted white supremacists, were executed, one in 2011 and the other in 2019, and the case led to new state and federal hate crime laws. The third man is serving a life sentence.
The moment a district attorney chooses to seek the death penalty on a capital murder charge, the cost increases as those trials often require a more expensive jury selection process, expert witnesses from out of state and a separate trial to determine if execution is warranted. Those costs are incurred by the counties, but long periods of incarceration on death row and yearslong appeals processes are costs the state pays.
“All of this adds up to a very expensive system, and that meter starts running the minute the district attorney decides that [they’re] going to seek the death penalty,” Houlé Cuellar said.
Other significant developments adding to the decline of death penalty convictions occurred in 2017 and 2019 when U.S. Supreme Court rulings originating from Harris County mandated that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals update its standards on disqualifying death sentences based on intellectual disability. Executions of those with intellectual disabilities are considered cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and 18 people have been removed from death row since 2017 based on evidence of intellectual disability.
Despite the decades-long decrease, 2024 had the highest number of new sentences in five years, with six people receiving the death penalty, three alone out of Tarrant County — its first since 2019. Houlé Cuellar said all three trials falling in 2024 is somewhat unintentional because the charges were brought across a three-year period, but the fact the death penalty was pursued at all speaks to a mindset some prosecutors have.
“I think the fact that all three trials happen this year is somewhat random, but the decision to seek the death penalty was very deliberate and reflects a very … aggressive use of the death penalty out of a county that really seems to be going in the opposite direction from the rest of the state,” Houlé Cuellar said.
Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells said in a statement to the Texas Tribune that choosing to levy the death penalty against anyone is “never an easy decision,” but clarified the juries in all three cases in 2024 agreed with the sentencing.
“We don’t often ask for the death penalty,” Sorrells said in the statement. “But in 2024, we asked juries three times to convict capital murderers and give them the death penalty. Three times they agreed.”
Dallas and Harris counties lead in the number of death sentences handed down, but Tarrant County’s three cases in 2024 placed it ahead of Bexar County for third highest in the state. The four counties together represent more than half of all executions in the state, as Harris remained the top county in the U.S. for executions with 135 since 1977, two of which were in 2024.
Public opinion on the death penalty has also split between older and younger Americans. National support for the sentence has dwindled to its lowest since 1972, having dropped more than 10% since 2000, according to an October Gallup poll. And while 53% of U.S. adults overall were in favor of the death penalty in 2024, less than half of Gen Z and Millennial adults supported the sentence.
“As the death penalty has been used less in terms of new death sentences and executions have become fewer, the death penalty is really fading from the minds of many voters to the point that some may conclude it’s simply not necessary,” Maher said.
Ten executions are currently scheduled nationally for 2025, four of which are in Texas. Those four scheduled do not include Robert Roberson, whose execution has not yet been rescheduled after it was temporarily blocked by the Texas Supreme Court in October. Roberson’s case has received national attention because of the contention around his innocence and a bipartisan effort within a Texas House of Representatives committee to halt his execution.
Steven Lawayne Nelson, who was convicted of suffocating a pastor with a plastic bag and assaulting a woman during a church robbery in Arlington, is scheduled to be Texas’ first execution in 2025 on Feb. 5.
A&M was very good as well last season, winning its first eight games en route to a 48-11 record and a share of the SEC Tournament title. Ace pitcher Emiley Kennedy is gone as are key bats such as Koko Wooley and Amari Harper. But head coach Trisha Ford is confident in a team picked to finish sixth in the SEC’s preseason poll.
A groundout by Edwards is followed by a lineout from Sauni. DeeDee Baldwin comes in to pinch-hit but strikes out on a 3-2 pitch. The Aggies suffer their first loss of the season.
Two strikeouts and a groundout send us to the last of the seventh.
Preseason All-SEC selection Perez strikes out, Wark flies out and Dement pops out against Canady as the teams are down to their final three outs.
Peters stays strong with a strikeout, groundout and flyout. The heart of the Aggies order is coming up, down one.
Vrazel reached on a one-out infield single, but was erased on a fielder’s choice. A long flyout from Kowalewski ends the inning. Canady has settled in nicely after the two first-inning runs.
The first error of the game gives Texas Tech a late lead. Davis reached on the miscue then made it to second on a passed ball. A double from Williams gave TTU the advantage as Sidne Peters enters to end the half-inning.
Canady matches Munnerlyn’s perfection as the game heads into the final stretch tied.
Texas Tech goes down 1-2-3 for the first time all game with the new pitcher in the circle.
A two-out hit by Perez goes for naught as the score stays tied. Kate Munnerlyn takes over at pitcher on the other side of the break.
Vrazel crashes into the wall making a catch on a long Pannell flyout to begin the half-inning to the delight of a soldout Davis Diamond crowd. Lessentine then induced a popup and strikeout to maintain the tie.
Edwards reached on a hit by pitch, but a flyout, strikeout and groundout for Canady ended the frame.
Terry reached to the begin the inning and made it to third base with two out. But Dement and Powell teamed up on a fielder’s choice to tag her at third base after a grounder to the shortstop off the bat of Williams.
After Kennedy Powell singled to start the game, Canady retired two Aggies on groundouts. But a Wark home run to left field tied the game. Dement struck out to end the inning.
Davis takes the third pitch of the game deep for a home run. Williams then followed up with a homer of her own on a 3-2 pitch. Lessentine retired three of the next four to get out of the inning.
The Aggies are wearing cream-colored jerseys. A&M volleyball coach Jamie Morrison, who led his team to a national title, is on hand to throw out the first pitch.
Location: Davis Diamond in College Station
Sign up for the Surge, the newsletter that covers most important political nonsense of the week, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which once again has had the NFL reject its pitch to perform a live reading of this newsletter as the Super Bowl halftime show.
The United States, and its news, failed to improve this week. Congress did fund the government but is already stuck ahead of the next spending deadline. Tulsi Gabbard remains at large. And while it’s not entirely about politics—though it’s not not about politics—we couldn’t resist a few words about the gutting of the local newspaper.
Blah, blah, life is sad—well, not anymore, because we’re kicking off 2026 primary season with Texas Week! Everybody grab two handfuls of sizzlin’ Texas chili (??) and git to reading.
1.
James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett
Entering the thick of primary season.
We are less than a month from the start of 2026 primary season, as Texas voters go to the polls on March 3. This is welcome news to the Surge. Early primary coverage feels so distant with its talk of endorsements, “war chests,” and other lifeless stats. Now we can cover proper knife fights down the stretch.
The prime drama of the week came in Texas’ competitive Senate Democratic primary between state Rep. James Talarico and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, of Dallas. It started when Morgan Thompson, a Texas TikTok personality, said that Talarico had told her privately “that he signed up to run against a mediocre Black man, not a formidable and intelligent Black woman.” The Black man in question is former Rep. Colin Allred, who ended his Senate campaign last year and switched to a House race. Allred then posted his own video response in which he endorsed Crockett and trashed Talarico, telling him, “If you want to compliment a Black woman, just do it. Just do it. Don’t do it while also tearing down a Black man.” For his part, Talarico said Thompson had offered a “mischaracterization” of his remark, and that he described only Allred’s “method of campaigning as mediocre.” (Not a particularly controversial observation there.)
National Republicans, who would prefer to run against the more polarizing, partisan figure in Crockett, have greatly enjoyed this all. It’s been a welcome distraction from their own Texas problems.
2.
John Cornyn
How much do Republicans need to worry, here?
Our view of the Texas Senate race has been that it gets way too much attention for a contest that Republicans are probably going to win by 5 to 7 points. It’s not among the top pickup opportunities that national Democrats are targeting. Democrats haven’t won statewide there since 1994, and they seriously backslid in the state in 2024. It’s expensive to run in. There’s always a lot of temptation, every cycle, for Democrats to believe that this time could be different. It never materializes.
All of which is to say: It’s temptation time again! The national atmosphere is lousy for Republicans, the gains they made among Hispanic voters in 2024 to fortify their Texas standing are evaporating, Texas Republicans just got dusted in a special election in what they thought was a safe-red district, and, most importantly, they have candidate problems of their own. Incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who would likely win reelection to his seat if he made it to November’s general, is in dreadful primary shape. After $50 million in advertising has been spent on his behalf, it’s still not clear that he’d make it to a runoff in his primary against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt. Even if he did make the runoff against Paxton, he’d likely be at a disadvantage. If Paxton, another partisan, polarizing figure laden with personal and professional baggage, becomes Republicans’ nominee, Democrats will feel the Texas temptation like never before.
3.
Tulsi Gabbard
Things aren’t getting less weird.
We regret to say that at the rate she’s going, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is at risk of replacing Lindsey Graham as the Surge’s go-to “Here’s what they were up to this week” entry. Not a good sign for America. We’ve learned of late that Gabbard, who had been out of the public eye for a while, has been running her own investigation into the results of the 2020 election and sniffing around old ballots and voting machines. She was on the scene at an FBI raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, election center last week and, as we learned a few days ago, apparently called the president from Atlanta and put him on speakerphone with the agents who conducted the raid. None of this is within the DNI’s purview, all of it is wildly inappropriate at best, any of it would be a major scandal that Congress oversees immediately in a functioning government.
There is more. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that there’s a whistleblower complaint about Gabbard “that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress,” and that it’s “said to be locked in a safe.” A redacted version of the complaint, then, was finally made available to a select group of lawmakers later in the week, with executive privilege claims getting in the way of the good stuff. We shall see. Elsewhere in Gabland: It was reported that Gabbard “obtained” voting machines from Puerto Rico to play around with them and look for security vulnerabilities. OK!
4.
Jeff Bezos
A lot of people’s fault. But mostly his.
The Washington Post eliminated about a third of its staff and hundreds of journalism jobs this week in the worst single-day massacre of expertise and talent we’ve ever seen—even in an industry that’s been contracting all century. The Post nixed its sports and books coverage, axed much of its arts coverage, and gutted its international and metro desks. It is now narrowly focused on District of Columbia news and politics, making it less a swaggering international newspaper than a publication whose purview matches Politico’s.
The Post has gone through highs and lows going back decades. Yet the acute mismanagement of the past couple of years by its owner, Jeff Bezos, after he’d lost any apparent interest in owning a newspaper, is staggering. Seeking to protect his business before the government ahead of a potential Trump win in 2024, Bezos barred the editorial board from making an endorsement in the presidential race, costing the paper hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Individual mega-billionaires are under no obligation to use their largesse to subsidize public institutions like the Post forever. (A gentleman, though, might backfill at least the hole he personally created by interfering with the editorial board.) They’re not obligated to do so when it collides with their other business interests. We do think they’re obligated, however, to find someone who is willing to carry the task forward. Rather than destroy a public institution because it’s become a hassle in various ways, sell it to someone who gives a shit.
5.
Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries
ICE negotiations are going about as well as you’d expect.
Senate Democrats got what they wanted in the government funding battle that ensued following the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Rather than extend funding for the Department of Homeland Security through September, it would be extended for two weeks while Democrats and Republicans negotiated some new restraints over immigration enforcement. The Senate passed this rejiggered deal late last week, and the House muscled it through on Tuesday.
It is now Saturday, and the sum total of negotiating progress that has been made is nothing. Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries put out a list of 10 demands—among them no masks for DHS officers, no roving DHS patrols, no racial profiling—which was met coolly by Republicans. “Democrats’ newest proposal is a ridiculous Christmas list of demands for the press,” Alabama’s Katie Britt, Senate Republicans’ lead DHS appropriator, said. “They continue to play politics to their radical base at the expense of the safety of Americans.” Democrats, meanwhile, say they are being serious—and it’s the Republicans who aren’t! Et cetera, et cetera, and so on and so forth. The conversation has moved largely toward what the next short-term DHS funding patch will look like, because a bigger deal to rein in immigration authorities does not appear to be in the ballpark of imminent.
6.
John Thune
Can the GOP’s dream voting law squeeze through the Senate?
A marked push from the most conservative factions in the House and Senate to pass a major voter verification and ID bill has kicked off, but it’s hitting the same old wall: the Senate filibuster. The bill in question was, at first, the SAVE Act, legislation that would require showing “documentary proof of United States Citizenship” in order to register to vote. Now there’s a new version—the SAVE America Act—that tacks on a requirement for presenting photo ID at polling places. Senate Democrats are fully hostile to the legislation, with Schumer calling it “Jim Crow 2.0” and saying it’s about “federalizing voter suppression.”
In order to appease certain House conservatives who were threatening to hold up the government funding bill this week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he would at least have a conversation with his senators about how to proceed on the SAVE Act and its successors. One idea that’s come up, as it often does during desperate times, is to force the minority to stage a “talking filibuster” to stall it, and wait for them to exhaust their parliamentary options. Those never happen, and for good reason: It could eat up weeks or months of valuable Senate floor time and force Senate Republicans to be on or near the Senate floor for most of that time. This is one of those discussions we’d expect to naturally dissipate on its own once it becomes clear how unpalatable all of the options are. But depending on how involved Trump gets, Thune could have to withstand a lot of pressure.
7.
Jeanine Pirro
Preach!
The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia finally said something cool this week, then got in trouble for it. “You bring a gun into the District, you mark my words, you’re going to jail,” Jeanine Pirro said in an appearance on her old stomping grounds at Fox News. “I don’t care if you have a license in another district, and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.” This didn’t sit well with gun-rights groups, who were already displeased with the administration for the way it talked about how Alex Pretti, who was carrying lawfully, shouldn’t have brought his gun with him to protest immigration officers in Minnesota. Elected Republicans, too, criticized her, with Florida Rep. Greg Steube, for example, telling Pirro, “Come and Take it!”
As Steube said in his own post, though, he’s licensed in both Florida and D.C. to carry. No one, regrettably, is going to take away Greg Steube’s gun. “Let me be clear: I am a proud supporter of the Second Amendment,” Pirro said in a follow-up social media post. “Washington, D.C. law requires handguns be licensed in the District with the Metropolitan Police Department to be carried into our community. We are focused on individuals who are unlawfully carrying guns and will continue building on that momentum to keep our communities safe.” That’s just a simple explanation of D.C. law that it’s her job to enforce. So she’ll probably have to keep apologizing.
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