On March 11, 2026, the State of Texas executed Cedric Ricks. Ricks was sentenced to death for killing his girlfriend, Roxann Sanchez, and her eight-year-old son, Anthony Figueroa, in Tarrant County in 2013. In his last words, he expressed his remorse and apologized to Sanchez’s surviving son.
Ricks’s cert petition and application for a stay of execution were denied by the Supreme Court of the United States earlier in the day. His attorneys had asked the Justices to intervene, arguing prosecutors violated Ricks’ constitutional rights by eliminating potential jurors on the basis of race.
Ricks has long suspected that the State discriminated because of jurors’ race during jury selection. Indeed, he raised a Batson objection at the time of trial and specifically asked to see the State’s notes. The State refused to provide their notes. …
It was not until 2021, during federal habeas proceedings, that the State finally disclosed their jury selection notes (likely inadvertently) showing that they tracked the race of minority jurors not only in the broad venire pool but more specifically those jurors who fell within the strike zone. Yet, the federal district court denied Ricks permission to return to state court and present his unexhausted Batson claim.
According to the Austin Chronicle, in earlier appeals, Ricks’s attorneys argued that the jury was allowed to see him wearing shackles at his trial, which violated his constitutional rights. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that seeing a defendant in shackles undermines the presumption of innocence. Ricks’s attorneys argued that prosecutors at his trial went out of their way to mention the shackling during the punishment phase of his trial, writing, “[T]he State all but told the jury it could know that Ricks would be a future danger because ‘[y]ou saw him walk back to counsel table this morning with shackles on.’” State and federal judges ruled that it would not have changed his sentence, however, and that he had not raised the issue at the appropriate moment in the appeals process.
Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Ricks’s appeals without reviewing the merits of the claims he raised. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to recommend clemency. His attorneys had sought mercy, urging the Board to recognize his spiritual growth while on death row and the responsibility he took for his actions and the harm they have caused.
Ricks was the second person put to death in Texas this year and the sixth nationally. Tarrant County, where he was convicted, is one of the state’s most aggressive death penalty jurisdictions. It now accounts for 47 executions since 1982, more than any county in Texas except Harris and Dallas counties. Another man convicted in Tarrant County, Edward Busby, has an execution date in May. In 2025, Texas executed five people. The State has executed 598 people since 1982.
Another execution that was scheduled for this week in Alabama was called off on Tuesday, when Alabama Governor Kay Ivey granted clemency to Charles “Sonny” Burton. Ivey commuted Burton’s death sentence to life in prison after acknowledging that executing him would be “unjust” since he did not pull the trigger in the killing of Doug Battle during a robbery in 1991. Burton is now 75 years old.