In this edition Reflections on race and “future dangerousness” in the Texas death penalty Scheduled executions: State of Texas seeks to execute Billy Joe Wardlow for a crime he committed […]
Author: Kristin
Kristin Houlé Cuellar is the Executive Director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP).
Many of Texas’s most troubling death penalty cases are rooted in a corrosive system of racism fostered by predictions of future dangerousness, a unique facet of our state’s capital punishment statute.
On Monday, June 8, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court remanded the death penalty case of Terence Andrus to Texas for further review, finding that his trial attorney provided inadequate and deficient legal representation. Among his many failings were neglecting to investigate or present readily-available mitigating evidence of Andrus’s troubled upbringing, which could have persuaded the jury to spare his life.
Just an hour before he was scheduled to be executed by the State of Texas, Ruben Gutierrez received a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court. Gutierrez had asked the U.S. […]
Today, Ruben Gutierrez, who is scheduled to be executed by the State of Texas on Tuesday at 6 p.m. CT, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay his execution in order to consider his request to allow a Christian chaplain in the execution chamber, a request that was routine in hundreds of Texas executions until April 2019, when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) changed the rules. The Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops filed an amicus brief in support of Gutierrez.
Late Friday night, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas’s stay of execution of Ruben Gutierrez, who seeks DNA testing […]
Today, the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops (TCCB) filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in support of death row prisoner Ruben Gutierrez. […]
Update: The Texas Attorney General has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to overturn the stay. Check back for new developments. Earlier today, a federal […]