Last night, September 24, 2024, the State of Texas executed Travis Mullis. In 2011, a jury in Galveston County sentenced Mullis to death for killing his three-month-old son, Alijah. Because Mullis waived his rights to both a direct appeal and state habeas petition, no court conducted a constitutional review of his conviction and sentence, according to his current attorney.
In an article for the Austin Chronicle, journalist Brant Bingamon shed light on Mullis’s lifelong history of mental illness and how it effectively sabotaged efforts to appeal his case. He writes, “After arriving on death row, Mullis wavered for months, and then years, over whether to go forward with his appeals. He repeatedly dismissed his attorneys, then called them back to the case. In 2012, the state courts decided he had forfeited his right to an appeal.”
In 2021, federal courts also decided Mullis had given up his right to appeal. His attorneys argued that Mullis was not competent to waive the appeals, but in 2023, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their request to reconsider the case.
Mullis’s appellate attorneys told Bingamon that by the age of 3, Mullis was being treated for emotional problems. At 6, he told a therapist he was being sexually abused by his adoptive father. Through the rest of his childhood, he was in and out of mental health treatment centers, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder. At 18, his adoptive mother bought him a one-way bus ticket to the Houston area, where he lived with a woman he’d met online, with no access to medication and no apparent ability to care for himself. Yet “the jury [in his 2011 trial] heard just a fraction of the horrors in Mullis’s life,” according to his current attorneys.
Texas will kill a redeemed man tonight. Travis Mullis committed an awful crime and has always accepted responsibility. He never had a chance at life being abandoned by his parents and then severely abused by his adoptive father starting at age three. During his decade and a half on death row he spent countless hours working on his redemption. And he achieved it. The Travis that Texas wanted to kill is long gone. Rest in Peace TJ.
— Shawn Nolan, Attorney for Travis Mullis; Chief, Capital Habeas Unit, Federal Defender for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
Read more about the case from the Austin Chronicle and the Associated Press.
Mullis was the fourth person executed in Texas this year and the 590th since 1982.
Also last night, Missouri executed Marcellus (“Khaliifah”) Williams for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle despite evidence of his innocence, a prosecutor’s confession of racial bias during the jury selection process at trial, and the opposition of the victim’s family to the death penalty.
In an editorial, “Executions of the conceivably innocent are no better than human sacrifice,” the Los Angeles Times writes, “The two witnesses against him [Williams] are known liars, and the bloody footprint and hair samples found at the scene were determined not to belong to him or the victim in the 2001 fatal stabbing for which he was convicted. DNA samples on the murder weapon haven’t been analyzed because prosecutors handled the knife without gloves and tainted the evidence. A Missouri governor stayed an earlier execution and ordered a board to investigate the case. But a new governor dissolved the board and revoked the stay.”
Missouri Governor Mike Parson denied clemency for Williams despite the serious doubts about the integrity of his conviction and death sentence. More than one million concerned citizens had petitioned Governor Parson in support of clemency for Williams.
Williams had two cert petitions pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, including one seeking review of the Missouri Supreme Court’s refusal to vacate his conviction despite Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell’s confession of constitutional error in his trial, including racially biased jury selection. Around 5:00 PM CT yesterday, the Court denied Williams’ motion for a stay of execution, over the dissent of three Justices. Attorney statement here.
We would like to thank our colleagues with Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty for their years-long effort to stop this horribly senseless and wrongful execution.
Two more executions are set this week in Alabama and Oklahoma. According to a media advisory from the Death Penalty Information Center, “If all four scheduled executions proceed in Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Alabama, the U.S. will reach the 1600th execution in the modern era of the death penalty, despite public opinion polls showing growing concerns about the fairness and accuracy of the death penalty and declining support for its use.”