Texas could resume executions tonight, February 5, 2025, after a four-month break. The State is scheduled to execute Steven Nelson despite the fact that no jury or court has considered significant evidence that he did not kill pastor Clinton Dobson, that he had a minor role in the offense as a lookout for two other men as they robbed NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington in 2011, and that there are profound mitigating circumstances, including a history of childhood abuse and trauma, that could have precluded a death sentence.
Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Nelson’s appeal and motion for a stay of execution without reviewing the merits of the claims he raised and on Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to recommend clemency. Nelson has filed a petition for a writ of certiorari and an application for a stay of execution with the Supreme Court of the United States, which is still pending as of this morning.
On October 8, 2012, a Tarrant County jury found Nelson guilty of capital murder based on an instruction permitting a conviction for a capital murder committed by someone else (known in Texas as the “law of parties”). Jurors then sentenced Nelson to death for killing Dobson in 2011 during the burglary in which Judy Elliott, the church’s secretary, was seriously beaten.
Nelson received grossly inadequate legal representation during both his 2012 trial and his initial state post-conviction proceedings. His attorneys failed to investigate evidence related to two possible accomplices with dubious alibis. One of these men was found with some of the victims’ stolen items and initially arrested alongside Nelson in 2011, but a grand jury opted not to indict him after he presented a dubious alibi.
His attorneys also failed to investigate his history of childhood abuse, neglect, and trauma, which led to serious untreated mental health issues, including several suicide attempts as a teenager. This critical mitigating evidence was not presented to the jury charged with determining whether to sentence Nelson to death.
“ Should I have time? Yes. Should I be in prison? Yes,” Nelson recently told The Dallas Morning News inside the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston, where he has spent more than 12 years on death row. “But everybody can be rehabilitated. I’m not a lost cause.”
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Tarrant County, where juries have sentenced 78 people to death since 1973, now ranks third in use of the death penalty in Texas. Last year, Tarrant County juries sent three men to death row, accounting for half of the new death sentences imposed in the state. Forty-five people convicted in Tarrant County have been executed.
If the execution proceeds, Nelson will be the first person put to death in Texas this year and the second nationwide. Texas executed five people in 2024 and accounts for more than 590 executions since 1982.