Resources

These pages will direct you to places where you can learn more about recent and upcoming Texas executions.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice maintains an excellent web site with information about all executions that have been performed in Texas since 1982.

• Offenders on Death Row - personal data on each offender (including photos), a description of the crime, prior prison record, and co-defendants.
• Scheduled Executions - a subset of the above, listing only those with execution dates scheduled.
• Executed Offenders - records of all executions since 1982, including last statements.
• TDCJ Death Row Home Page - links to all of the above pages and more, including media witnesses, overall statistics, and breakdowns by race, gender, and county.
• TDCJ Home Page - use this if the above links don't work, or if you want to do more exploring.

Other Official Resources

These state and federal web sites contain official documents pertaining to death penalty cases, often in very great detail.

• Texas Attorney General's Office - The Texas Attorney General's office issues press releases about each execution. They are typically released the day before the execution is to be performed. They contain data about the facts of the crime, the trial, and appeals. Although most of the information presented is from the prosecution's point of view, these press releases contain valuable information that is unavailable elsewhere. Available only from 1999 to date.
• Texas Court of Criminal Appeals - This is the highest court in Texas for criminal cases. Its published opinions and "hand downs" (laundry lists of cases and verdicts, without elaboration) are available in HTML back to November 1999, and in WordPerfect format back to January 1998. The archives are not searchable; you must know the date of the case to look it up.
• U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Opinions - Since the U.S. Supreme Court takes so few death penalty cases, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is effectively the final authority for most Texas cases. Their web site contains published opinions in HTML going back at least to 1992 (not sure how complete the archive is). The keyword search is very handy for looking up cases involving a given prisoner.

National and State News

Each of these sources usually reports on every execution in the state.

• Death Penalty and Execution News - this is a collection of recent news articles and editorials about the death penatly. The news articles include not just the standard day-after reports, but also excerpts from death row interviews and reports on judicial procedings and opinions that affect pending death row cases. Most or all of the editorials are anti-death penalty.
• Crime and Capital Punishment Forum - message board where supporters of the death penalty post and comment on news articles, court cases, and other information about upcoming executions in the United States.
• Associated Press reports. The AP does at least one story on each execution. They are usually found in Houston & Texas news in The Houston Chronicle and Local news in The Dallas Morning News. It is helpful to read both newspapers' versions of the AP stories because they are not always identical.
• Local news in The Huntsville Item - this is the only Texas newspaper that does its own reporting of every execution.

Local News

Except for the Huntsville Item, Texas newspapers generally rely on the Associated Press for their statewide execution coverage. However, when the story has a local interest (e.g. because the crime was committed there), local newspapers often do their own reporting. A partial list of newspapers is provided below. If you know which county the offense ocurred in, you can use your browser's "Find" feature to find a newspaper that covers that area.

Copyright © 2002-2024 by David Carson. Unauthorized publication, either printed or electronic, is prohibited. This includes posting to Usenet, blogs, and message boards.