Texas completes its first execution of 2025

As reported in this AP piece, a "Texas man convicted of beating and suffocating a Dallas area pastor in his church during a robbery was put to death Wednesday evening, the second execution in the U.S. this year and the first of four scheduled in Texas over the next three months."  Here is more:  

Steven Lawayne Nelson, 37, received a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m. CST at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He was convicted of the 2011 killing of the Rev. Clint Dobson, a 28-year-old pastor who was beaten, strangled and suffocated with a plastic bag inside NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington. The church’s secretary, Judy Elliott, 67, was severely beaten but survived....

Nelson was a laborer and high school dropout with a long history of legal trouble and arrests that started as early as age 6. Nelson had pleaded for mercy, claiming that he had only served as a robbery lookout and blamed two other men for killing Dobson.

Trial evidence showed Nelson’s fingerprints and pieces of his broken belt at the crime scene, drops of the victims’ blood on his sneakers, and surveillance video showing him driving Elliott’s car and using her credit cards. Investigators also said the two men Nelson blamed for the attack had detailed alibis.

Nelson’s attorneys appealed on claims of bad legal representation at his trial and sentencing, saying this lawyers did little to challenge the alibis of the other men, or present mitigating evidence of a troubled childhood in Oklahoma and Texas.

While awaiting trial, Nelson was indicted in the killing of another jail inmate. He was never tried on that charge after his guilty verdict and death sentence.