Power our Fight for Justice
Dear Supporters,
Texas has the largest prison population in the United States. Every month, the Lone Star State sends thousands of people to prison for excessive sentences that fail to serve any public safety purpose. Texas Defender Service was formed to provide vital legal advocacy for indigent people in Texas facing extreme sentences—advocacy that our State fails to subsidize.
But we need your help. We fight against a well-funded state apparatus that is not interested in fairness, humanity, equity, or justice. And against the odds, we have saved 34 lives from execution or death sentence since 2018. Our advocacy continues, but we need your support to give people in need the representation they deserve. Please give a gift so we can protect our clients from some of the harshest and most unjust punishments on the planet.
In the next six months:
- Our mitigation specialists are digging deep into life history investigations and trial preparation for three clients who face death-penalty trials.
- We are advocating on appeal for our client Dillan Compton, a Black man who received the death penalty after prosecutors excluded women and Black people from his jury and then claimed in closing arguments that he was playing the “race card.”
- At an upcoming hearing, our lawyers will present evidence that one of our clients has an intellectual disability and so is constitutionally exempt from the death penalty.
Achieving justice in Texas—the epicenter of mass incarceration on the planet—is, and will always be, an uphill battle. But these are fights we can win with your support. Please provide a gift to power our movement for justice in Texas.
The arc of the universe is long, but together we can do the work of bending it toward justice—one case and one life at a time.
With gratitude,
Burke Butler
Executive Director
Texas Defender Service