By Ayden Runnels, The Texas Tribune, Feb. 5, 2025
Barring a final-minute stay, Steven Lawayne Nelson is determined to be completed Wednesday evening for killing an Arlington pastor, a crime he has maintained he did now not commit, though he admitted he used to be there for a robbery while the homicide came about. The execution would be Texas’ first in 2025.
On March 3, 2011, the then 24-year-stale Nelson entered NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington to commit a robbery. At some stage in, officers talked about he suffocated 28-year-stale Pastor Clint Dobson to death and assaulted 69-year-stale Judy Elliott, who used to be so badly overwhelmed her husband originally did now not sight her when he arrived on the church.
Nelson used to be arrested two days later when he used to be discovered riding Elliott’s automobile, which contained several objects belonging to her and Dobson. Somewhat of over a year later, he used to be convicted of killing Dobson and sentenced to death.
Despite his conviction, Nelson has maintained his innocence through moral appeals and interviews. The now 37-year-stale testified at trial, in opposition to his moral representation’s wishes, that while he used to be complicit within the robbery, he used to be staunch a lookout and didn’t enter the church till after an accomplice had killed Dobson. A few of the two men Nelson claimed used to be an accomplice used to be charged however no longer indicted by an limitless jury, and the opposite used to be no longer charged.
Nelson’s execution, which also steadily is the first within the United States in 2025, comes at a time wherein death sentences and executions in Texas possess reached story lows. The rising infrequency of executions, doubts on whether Nelson truly killed Dobson and the involvement of Dobson’s church possess sparked conversations on the aesthetic and spiritual implications of capital punishment.
After Nelson used to be convicted and sentenced to death in 2012, officers with First Baptist Arlington, NorthPointe’s mother or father church, launched a assertion apparently approving his death sentence.
“We now possess asked God for the fact to be known and for justice to be served,” the assertion talked about. “We now can confidently snarl that justice has been served and we can reduction the decision of this court.”
The Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual adviser to Nelson and several other inmates who were completed across the nation and an recommend for abolishing the death penalty, talked about Nelson’s case stands out, particularly ensuing from the assertion from church officers.
“It’s disgusting for a church to equate the love of God, the love of Jesus, with the love of executions, the love of killing,” Hood talked about.
Hood has been assembly with Nelson for months in preparation for the execution and to alter into “his ultimate honest appropriate friend” sooner than the snarl kills him. Even Nelson’s version of events — that he stepped over overwhelmed and bloodied victims to contrivance shut their valuables — replicate a extreme crime that requires extreme punishment, Hood talked about. However the reverend argued execution on the least has little to slay with Nelson’s culpability and more regarding the snarl.
“Right here is no longer a Robbie Roberson or Will Speer roughly feel-staunch form story. It’s no longer that. What Steven did is nefarious, I mean tremendously nefarious,” Hood talked about. “[But] I say I would argue it’s more about us and never more about him.”
On the time, Tarrant County prosecutors charged Nelson on my own with homicide, pointing to blood spatter on Nelson’s shoes, objects of Nelson’s belt on the scene and his possession of stolen objects from the church. At some stage within the sentencing listening to, prosecutors also called a Tarrant County jail inmate to testify that Nelson had killed a cellmate ultimately of his incarceration leading up to the trial, however no prices had been introduced in opposition to Nelson within the inmate’s death.
Besides to to the dearth of prices introduced in opposition to Nelson’s alleged accomplices, the pick’s instructions to the jury to depend upon the law of parties, which states that a person will most certainly be criminally in fee for the actions of yet every other person, also proved contentious for these disapproving of Nelson’s conviction. The instruction allowed the jury to convict Nelson per one among two determinations: that Nelson used to be staunch now in fee for Dobson’s death, or that he used to be occasion to a robbery he’ll need to possess anticipated would lead to death. The jury did now not specify which of the two it stale to realize the guilty verdict, per court documents.
Nelson filed a pair of appeals in his 13 years on death row, claiming his trial did now not adequately hit upon the involvement of the opposite two men, which he argued would possess altered the verdict.
All of Nelson’s appeals possess failed, the latest of which used to be for a stay of execution that used to be denied by the Texas Court docket of Prison Appeals staunch per week sooner than his scheduled execution. Nelson’s moral crew has appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court docket, claiming the prison appeals court did now not specify whether its denial used to be per federal or snarl precedent.
Nelson, born in Oklahoma, suffered bodily and sexual abuse ultimately of his childhood, which his protection crew ultimately of his sentencing listening to claimed affected his prison story before the Dobson homicide. In conversations with Nelson, Hood talked about he recognizes how that abuse carried over through his lifestyles.
“I slay say it’s most indispensable to keep in touch to the fact that right here’s somebody who had a horrendous childhood,” Hood talked about. “I say that it’s most indispensable to surely keep in touch to the fact that right here’s somebody that society gave up on, and I say when the crime occurs later, I say we’ve got reaped what we sow.”
Nelson steadily is the first inmate completed within the U.S. for the reason that Division of Justice launched a story casting doubt on lethal injection being a painless contrivance of capital punishment. In January, used Authorized knowledgeable Overall Merrick Garland rescinded federal inform of single-drug lethal injection — the identical protocol Texas has stale since 2014 — for its executions, citing evidence that it prompted pulmonary edema. The DOJ story likened the outcomes of the pulmonary edema to waterboarding.
Whereas the Texas Code of Prison Path of exempts these completed from autopsies, several autopsies performed on inmates completed by lethal injection in other states revealed elevated lung weight prompted by fluid.
Texas’ second execution of the year is scheduled on Feb. 15. Richard Tabler, who has been on death row since 2007, used to be convicted of capital homicide within the 2004 shooting deaths of two men in Killeen.
Editor’s expose: This text originally seemed in The Texas Tribune.
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