A North Texas man is set to be executed at the state penitentiary in Huntsville this evening despite maintaining his innocence in the 2011 murder of an Arlington pastor.
Steven Nelson, 37, was sentenced to death row in 2012 for the slaying of the Rev. Clint Dobson during a robbery. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice states Dobson was found inside his own church, NorthPointe Baptist in Arlington, having been suffocated with a plastic bag and suffering blunt force trauma injuries. Church secretary Judy Elliot was also found at the church beaten, but survived.
Nelson’s scheduled lethal injection would be the first in Texas since the execution of murderer Garcia White of Houston in October. That month, a second scheduled killing, of inmate Robert Roberson, was stayed by the Texas Supreme Court. Supporters of Roberson’s argued that the East Texas man was convicted using “junk science,” which had been overturned since his trial date and should have allowed for a reexamination of his case.
Advocates for Nelson cite similar miscarriages of justice in the trial that sentenced the man to death. In January, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied what could have been Nelson’s final appeal to delay his execution.
"People do deserve second chances," Nelson told NewsNation's true crime show Banfield. "I'm not the loss they say that I am."
A Claim of Innocence
Nelson openly admits that he, along with two other men, went to NorthPoint Baptist on the morning of March 3, 2011, with the intention of robbing the church. Nelson maintains he remained outside of the church keeping watch throughout the robbery and had no knowledge of the murder and assault of Elliot. It was the other two men, Nelson claims, who committed the ultimate crime.
When he was arrested by police four days after the crime, Nelson was found with Elliot’s credit cards and car keys.
“Should I have time? Yes. Should I be in prison? Yes,” Nelson said in a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News. “But everybody can be rehabilitated.”
Neither of the other two men ever faced prison time for the murder, something Nelson’s wife, Noa Dubois, says is a key example of the mishandling of her husband’s case. Both men presented alibis that Nelson’s advocates describe as erroneous — one never faced a murder charge and the other was not indicted by a grand jury for the crime.
During Nelson’s trial, a Tarrant County judge instructed the jury that Nelson could be convicted of capital murder if they believed he had committed the murder himself or if they believed that he should have known that lethal violence was possible during the robbery. The jury did not clarify which of the options they believed when finding Nelson guilty, the Texas Observer reports.
To document evidence in Nelson’s favor Dubois started a website, much of which purports that race was an influential factor in how Nelson’s trial was handled.
Among the website’s documents is a court filing that describes the state striking a number of Black, Asian and Hispanic individuals from the trial’s jury pool, which resulted in an all-white jury trying Nelson’s case. Another filing claims that a state expert witness testified to Nelson being a psychopath, a condition she tied in part to his race.
A Small Showing of Support
Nelson grew up in Oklahoma and had an extensive criminal record at the time of Dobson’s murder. He was on probation for an aggravated assault charge when the robbery took place. Dubois, who met Nelson through an inmate letter writing program in 2020, told the Texas Observer that the man she loves is not the one who graced newspaper headlines a decade ago.
“We connected on a lot of different things that we went through, on different scales of course, and on completely opposite sides of the world,” Dubois said.
Nelson’s record, coupled with the fact that he is Black, makes him “very easy to monster-ize,” the Rev. Jeff Hood, Nelson’s spiritual adviser and a staunch activist against the death penalty, said last fall. Alongside Dubois, Hood has led an effort to raise awareness for Nelson’s case and even hosted a small rally outside of First Baptist Arlington, NorthPointe’s parent church, last fall.
At the time of Nelson’s sentencing, First Baptist Arlington praised the handling of the trial, expressing comfort that the “wheels of justice” had worked.
“We have all waited for this day,” the church told CBS in a statement at the time. “We now can confidently say that justice has been served and we will support the decision of this court. We also want our community to know that Clint Dobson did not die in vain.”
Hood has criticized the church’s stance, arguing that it is not the role of a church to play executioner. As of June 2024, Hood had witnessed the executions of seven inmates he’d offered spiritual guidance to in several states, USA Today reports.
“The question is not about the perpetrator. It’s about us. Are we righteous enough to kill someone? Are we righteous enough to judge someone in that way?” Hood told the Texas Observer. “I knew that his case involved killing a pastor. And I also knew that this was going to be a circumstance where the church was going to advocate for him to be executed. And … to me, it’s like taking a big shit on the face of Jesus to advocate for someone to be killed.”
