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Not Your Typical Hell House
Callie Flores is one of those high-achieving high school students whose weekly schedule might make you wonder when she finds time to sleep. A junior, she plays alto saxophone in the Temple High School...
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Executions Are So Common, Even Protesting Them Has Become Routine
As executions go, Michael Yowell’s was not destined to be particularly notable. Fifteen years earlier, in Lubbock, he had been convicted of shooting his father and strangling his mother while trying to...
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Sitting in Legal Purgatory
“I don’t want you to be confused and think I’m suicidal or anything like that. It’s not natural for somebody to want to die,” said Jerry Duane Martin at a hearing about his death penalty case in June....
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When Prisoners Read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, It’s Pretty Powerful
“It’s a story about the difference between the head and the heart,” says Brian Troy. The story is Crime and Punishment by the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, and though it was a difficult read for...
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Can a Wrongful Conviction Ever Be Forgiven?
Every story of a wrongful conviction is a story of lingering bitterness and lasting feuds. Consider Anthony Graves, who is filing a complaint with the State Bar against prosecutor Charles Sebesta, who...
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Going Secular at SXSW
As Gungor concluded its South by Southwest set at the Red Eyed Fly, a grungy downtown Austin club, a fan in the front row started shouting at the band. It was a familiar request: to sing just one more...
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Streamlining the Quest to Overturn Wrongful Convictions
LUBBOCK, Tex. — In the back of the Cotton Exchange building in Lubbock’s dusty downtown, the Innocence Project of Texas keeps more than 10,000 files from state prisoners in dozens of blue, purple, and...
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The Many Lives of a Death Drug
On April 29 a media frenzy erupted over a botched execution in Oklahoma. The story is now familiar: a doctor administered a three-drug cocktail to convicted murderer Clayton Lockett. He lost...
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Where Have All the Cowboy Churches Come From?
On Father’s Day, nearly a thousand worshipers arrived at the Cowboy Church of Ellis County, the largest “cowboy church” in the world. After being greeted by four men perched on horses, they filed into...
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The Rise of Armed Teachers
Over nine days in July, the first class of school marshals gathered for training. The group of seven teachers and administrators, largely male, assembled at eight each morning at Tarrant County...
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When COVID-19 Hit the Smith County Jail, One Tyler Activist Became a Citizen...
With her four-year-old in the back seat, Dalila Reynoso parked between a gun store and a bail bond agency in downtown Tyler, peering through the window at the Smith County jail. When she saw a deputy...
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The Science Used to Send Him to Death Row Has Changed. The Courts Haven’t Yet...
Long after he retired from solving murders in rural East Texas, Brian Wharton looked back on one of his biggest cases with unease. A father named Robert Roberson had shown up at an emergency room with...
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