Dear Friends, One of the hidden features of our criminal-legal system in Texas is its enormous impact on women. The number of women incarcerated in Texas has increased by 951% since 1980, at more than twice the rate of male incarceration. Texas incarcerates more women than any other state.Eighty percent of women incarcerated in Texas prisons are […]
Dear Friends, We wanted to pass along the thrilling news that House Bill 115— proposed legislation by Republican House Member David Cook that would reform Texas’s junk science law—passed the Texas House of Representatives this session by a huge margin. In our report An Unfulfilled Promise: Assessing the Efficacy of Article 11.073, published last year, we found that Texas’s […]
Dear Friends, I wanted to make sure you knew that efforts to roll back the Michael Morton Act—Texas’s landmark law protecting the actually innocent from wrongful conviction—have been defeated! Michael Morton was wrongfully convicted of the murder of his wife in 1987. Separated from his then-three-year-old son, Michael spent nearly 25 years in prison before […]
Dear Friends, In one of his very first acts this January, President Trump called for use of the death penalty in every case in which an undocumented migrant commits a capital crime. As Cathy Buerger wrote in her op ed in Just Security, “the order signals that some people—by virtue of who they are—deserve to be killed.” President Trump’s Order […]
Dear Friends, I wanted to let you know that Scott Panetti, a former Texas Defender Service client, died at a prison hospital in Galveston on May 26, 2025. Panetti, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, had spent over 30 years on Texas death row. He was 67 years old. Panetti is most known for his 2007 case […]
Dear Friends, I wanted to share the important news that our former board member Charles S. Kelley and his team at Mayer Brown, along with Advancing Real Change, Inc., have succeeded in winning relief for their capitally convicted client Larry Estrada. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found that Mr. Estrada has intellectual disability and […]
