Tonight, October 7, 2026, the State of Texas is scheduled to execute Jamaal Howard for killing clerk Vickie Swartout while robbing a gas station in 2000 in Silsbee, Texas (Hardin County). He was 20 at the time and has spent more than half of his life on death row.
Mr. Howard is the first person to face execution since the horribly botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee on September 30, 2026. Ms. Pike survived two lethal doses of pentobarbital, the same drug used in executions in Texas. On October 6, her attorneys reported that she is now conscious and speaking, but remains hospitalized in critical condition.
Attorneys for Mr. Howard are seeking to stop the execution based on concerns about Texas’s use of pentobarbital as well as longstanding claims that Howard has an intellectual disability.
Mr. Howard has asked the Supreme Court of the United States to issue a stay, asserting that he is ineligible for the execution because of his intellectual disability. That request remains pending before the Justices.
Counsel for Mr. Howard also have asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott to exercise his constitutional authority to issue a 30-day reprieve given the unanswered questions about the drug the State intends to use in the lethal injection. They are seeking a stay from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on the same grounds.
Read more from the Texas Tribune.
Evidence of intellectual disability and severe mental illness
On October 5, 2026, both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to intervene in the case. Mr. Howard had filed a writ of habeas corpus with the Texas CCA asserting that his death sentence violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments because he is an intellectually disabled person. The Texas CCA dismissed both the writ and Mr. Howard’s motion for a stay of execution without reviewing the merits of his claim.
In his application for clemency, Mr. Howard had asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Governor Abbott to commute his death sentence based on evidence of his intellectual disability and his longstanding severe mental illness, which started to manifest when he was a teenager and included auditory hallucinations at the time of the crime. The Board voted not to recommend the commutation of the death sentence to a lesser penalty.
Signs of Howard’s severe mental illness became apparent around age 15, when he began to withdraw from family and friends and experience voices and sounds that he described as “taking over his mind.”
Two separate juries considered whether he was competent to stand trial. The first jury deadlocked on that question, but the second jury found him competent and the trial proceeded.
An expert who evaluated Howard before his 2001 trial diagnosed him with schizophrenia. At this same time, his IQ was assessed to be between 65 and 70.
Fifteen years later, during his federal appeals, a psychiatrist confirmed the diagnosis of schizophrenia while another expert determined his full-scale IQ score to be 74, which is within the range of borderline intellectual functioning.
In the decades that Howard has spent on death row, he has responded well to medication to quell his hallucinations. No court has ever decided whether Howard is intellectually disabled under the clinical standards that govern today.
If the execution proceeds, Howard would be the sixth Black man put to death by Texas in 2026 (out of a total seven executions). He would be the third consecutive person executed for a crime that occurred when the defendant was under the age of 21.
The State has two more executions scheduled this year; both are men of color.