At 6 p.m. this evening Robert James Campbell will, odds are, become the first U.S. prisoner executed since Oklahoma spectacularly botched the lethal injection of Clayton Lockett two weeks ago. His lawyers have filed a last-ditch appeal, citing Lockett's death and the mysterious source of Texas' supp ... More >>
There have been two significant developments since the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state doesn't have to say where it got the pentobarbital it will use to kill death row inmates Tommy Lynn Sells and Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas. One is that the state of Texas, which had been rather vague ... More >>
The last time the Texas Department of Criminal Justice secured a cache of pentobarbital, the drug it uses to execute prisoners, the Houston-area compounding pharmacy that supplied it had second thoughts. "[I]t was my belief that this information would be kept on the 'down low,' and that it was unli ... More >>
Even after a wave of exonerations have confirmed the fallibility of the criminal justice system, even after the state's supply of lethal-injection drugs has been all but cut off by squeamish pharmaceutical companies, even as national support for capital punishment steadily declines, Texas remains en ... More >>
They don't last long these days in the media relations office at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. First, longtime public information director Michelle Lyons resigned last year after being demoted and accused of fudging her time sheets. This was after she responded to a media request from a ... More >>
Turns out, Michael John Yowell had nothing to worry about. A week after filing a federal lawsuit to delay his execution on the grounds that the state's custom-made supply of pentobarbital, ordered hastily from a Houston-area compounding pharmacy last month, might cause an unconstitutional amount of ... More >>
Death row inmate Michael Yowell's last-minute, Hail Mary lawsuit, based on the claim that the state was going to experiment on him with untested execution drugs, failed to sway U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes. In an order handed down Saturday, she dismissed that as "a guess piled on an assumption" a ... More >>
UPDATE: After this item ran, we sent a question to Texas Department of Criminal Justice public information director Jason Clark, asking him -- not to put too fine a point on it -- why Texas doesn't just switch to an alternative method of execution altogether, like the electric chair. The short answe ... More >>
Steven Kenneth Staley's guilt was never much in doubt. The facts of the case, attested to by multiple witnesses, were clear. One evening in 1989, Staley and two female accomplices showed up at a Tarrant County Steak & Ale with guns. When police showed up, Staley took the restaurant manager hostage, ... More >>
Texas has executed five people so far this year, all using the same procedure. First, a barbiturate, pentobarbital, is administered to induce unconsciousness. Then a dose of pancuronium bromide paralyzes every muscle in the body. Finally, a dose of potassium chloride stops the heart. That wil ... More >>
On Tuesday, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice announced it would use a single drug -- pentobarbital, a barbiturate -- to carry out executions due to a shortage of one component in a three-drug cocktail. Overseas manufacturers of pancuronium bromide, a powerful paralytic, have halted shipment ... More >>
It's been 11 years since George Rivas lead the Texas Seven in their escape from prison and shooting of a police officer, and the hour of his death is fast-approaching. At around 6 p.m, the State of Texas will end his life by lethal injection. Rivas confessed that he was the ringleader of the group ... More >>
Via....not seeing a whole lot of action.In the death penalty debate, Texas has a long-standing reputation for abiding by one guiding principal: an eye for an eye. But the state has increasingly chosen to holster its lethal-injection needles in recent years, with death-penalty sentences decrea ... More >>
At this very moment down in Huntsville, folks are marking the 25th anniversary of lethal injection in the U.S. at the Texas Prison Museum, which is hosting a panel discussion titled, fittingly, “25 Years of Lethal Injection: What Have We Learned?” Good question -- same one the Supreme Court's sc ... More >>