Category: Violent Crime
Texas has a bad record for wrongful convictions with more than 100 coming to light in recent years. And the revelations keep coming. This week in Corsicana a 58-year-old Texas man walked free from jail after serving almost 30 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Back in 1984 Randolph Arledge was sentenced to 99…
In northern Texas a judge has declined to dismiss a capital murder charge against a 17-year-old who is accused of killing his mother and sister even though it’s at odds with an important U.S. Supreme Court decision. Given the key ruling by the nation’s highest court, it’s not surprising that attorneys for Jacob Ryan Evans…
Texas inmate Michael Blair ended up on death row for the gruesome murder of a 7-year-old Texas girl. His protestations that he was innocent fell on deaf ears until more than 10 years later genetic tests proved he did not kill the girl. Now he is asking the state of Texas for nearly $1 million…
A high profile case in Texas explores the circumstances under which negligence can become murder. Jessica Tata is accused of being responsible for a fire at a home day care in Houston that killed four children and injured three others. Prosecutors allege that Tata left hot oil cooking on a stove at her home day…
When you are wrongly convicted of a crime you can waste much of your life in jail. Even when you are finally released your quality of life may not be the way it would have been before the miscarriage of justice occurred. The sad case of James Lee Woodard is a pertinent example. Just before…
Robert Wayne Harris looks set to be the eighth man to be executed in Texas this year after the Court of Criminal Appeals denied the death row inmate a stay of execution. The judges decided against stopping the execution, despite some disturbing evidence about the adequacy of the original defense case more than a decade…
In a high profile case in Arlington, Texas, the owner of a strip club that ran into trouble with the city, has pleaded guilty to plotting to murder the Mayor and a lawyer working for the city. KVUE.com reported 34-year-old Ryan Walker Grant faces serving 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, after taking…
Concerns about the low IQ of a death row inmate in Texas didn’t stop the state putting him to death this month. Marvin Wilson was executed on August 7, 2012, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the arguments of his lawyers that he shouldn’t have been eligible for the death penalty because of his low…
Plots about wealthy people planning the deaths of love rivals feature heavily in TV crime shows but are rare in real life. Many homicides involve people who know each other and many are spontaneous rather than meticulously planned. However a case in Lubbock, Texas in which a plastic surgeon is accused of paying an alleged…
Michael Morton describes his life as “starting from square one.” That’s because he was wrongly convicted for his wife’s 1986 murder and it took a quarter of a century for new advances in DNA to exonerate him. Morton’s case is highlighted in the second installment of the Texas Tribune’s series that looks at how prosecutorial…