In the modern era of the death penalty (1976 to the present), Texas has been responsible for more than a third of all U.S. executions. When it was founded in 1995, TDS’s Post-Conviction Project was the only death penalty litigation organization in Texas. Today, demand for post-conviction representation continues to outpace the state’s supply of qualified capital defense attorneys. The Post-Conviction Project continues to provide quality representation to men and women on Texas’s death row in all stages of the appellate process, from direct appeal through clemency. The Post-Conviction Project has represented clients in cases that have broad implications for the criminal justice system in Texas generally and that raise awareness of systemic injustices in the state’s use of the death penalty. TDS has represented clients with intellectual disability, whose severe mental illness renders them incompetent to be executed, and whose capital judgments were tainted with racial bias or procured through the state’s reliance on discredited junk science. In the course of this representation, TDS has won five victories on behalf of death-sentenced clients at the United States Supreme Court in Miller-El v. Cockrell, 537 U.S. 322 (2003), Miller-El v. Dretke, 545 U.S. 231 (2005), Panetti v. Quarterman, 551 U.S. 930 (2007), Buck v. Davis¸ 137 S. Ct. 759 (2017), and Ayestas v. Davis¸ 138 S. Ct. 1080 (2018).
