Jordan Maddox
Audio By Carbonatix
Huntsville, Texas, 1982.
Gloria Rubac remembers the thick crowd, primarily composed of students from Sam Houston State University, and the way they cheered outside the red-brick Texas State Penitentiary as the sun set. Having been a college student in Oklahoma in the 1960s and a staunch supporter of the anti-war and Civil Rights movements, Rubac was accustomed to a rowdy crowd of young people. What she couldn’t make sense of was the celebrating.
It was early December, and Texas was set to execute a man named Charles Brooks Jr. at midnight. Brooks, convicted of murdering Fort Worth car mechanic David Gregory in 1976, would become the first man to be executed in Texas since 1964, and the first person in the United States to be executed by lethal injection.
Rubac and a friend had attended a vigil in Brooks’ honor at a church in Houston that evening. Unsatisfied, the duo decided to drive to Huntsville even though Rubac knew she’d be expected at work in the morning. When they arrived, she was shocked to find that most of the onlookers outside of the Walls Unit, a nickname for the Huntsville prison facility, did not share her disgust with what was set to happen.
“I yelled something [at the students], and somebody from [the human rights organization] Amnesty International came up to me and told me, ‘We’re having a silent protest,’” Rubac said. “I was like, ‘Silent? They’re getting ready to murder somebody. If I was being murdered, I’d want everybody to be raising holy hell.’”
After Brooks’ execution, Rubac became involved in the Houston-based Coalition to Free Clarence Bradley, a Black school janitor from Conroe who was convicted of the rape and murder of a white student in 1981. Bradley was one of the men who found the student’s body, and was found guilty by an all-white jury following racially charged testimony from the prosecution. After nine years on death row, Bradley was found to have been wrongfully convicted in large part due to “racial prejudice.”
Rubac, who wrote for a socialist newspaper in addition to working as a school teacher, used her press credentials to visit Bradley while he was on death row. He introduced her to more inmates who needed a friend, an advocate, or both. By the end of the ’80s, she was all in.
Over the last four decades, Rubac has protested outside of the Walls Unit during a majority of state executions — she estimates somewhere between 400 and 500 killings. (Texas has executed 596 people since 1982.) She is a leader of The Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement group, which is based in Houston and advocates for the end of capital punishment because of the disproportionate way it is levied against people of color. According to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Black individuals make up nearly 50% of Texas’ death row population, while Black people account for only 14% of Texas’ general population.
On the evenings when Texas is scheduled to carry out an execution, Rubac’s group — often clad in yellow, holding signs that say “Honk to Stop Executions” and photos of the person scheduled to die — is one of several that protest. Some groups, like the one that invited Rubac to join on the night Brooks was killed, observe silently. Oftentimes, a smattering of Europeans observe the proceedings; many are pen pals or wives of inmates.
For decades, Rubac and other organizers who spoke with the Observer have felt frustrated by how little attention the abolition movement has received from the general public. In recent years, though, movies and documentaries about high-profile cases, and increased attention for inmates like Robert Roberson, the East Texas man who was found guilty of killing his young daughter in a trial that his supporters say hinged on since-debunked science, have brought new interest to the groups. Still, the sweeping changes they advocate for feel a long way off.
“The issue of innocence, apparently, is the issue that has changed public opinion,” Rubac said. “I don’t think anybody that’s guilty should be executed either, but that’s the issue that is changing public opinion. And right now, public support [for capital punishment] is down, the number of executions are down, and the number of people being sent to death row are way down. So I think Robert’s case is important in drawing attention.”
Illustration by Pablo Iglesias
Capital Punishment by the Numbers
The death penalty abolition movement dates back to America’s founding, with early political leaders like Thomas Jefferson weighing in on the severity of state-sanctioned capital punishment. (His initiative to limit the types of crimes that can result in a death sentence narrowly failed to pass in his home state of Virginia.) More than 140 countries and 23 U.S. states have outlawed the practice. Two other states, Oregon and Wyoming, legally allow capital punishment but have no inmates currently sentenced to death.
In Texas today, 169 people sit on death row, all but seven of them men. It’s the smallest death row population the state has seen since 1985, Texas Department of Criminal Justice data shows, reflecting what appears to be a growing unwillingness of juries to sentence someone to death for anything but the most egregious crimes.
“In 1994, 80% of Americans supported the death penalty, but by 2024, that support had decreased to 53%. When you dig into those numbers, you find that more than half of young Americans oppose the use of the death penalty, so we expect to see those numbers in opposition continue to climb,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
According to Maher, that shift in public sentiment has been driven by concerns about the financial cost of capital punishment, the way sentences are imposed arbitrarily based on geography or the cultural or political climate at the time of a trial and the belief that innocent Americans may be killed.
Abolitionist groups and legal analysts have estimated that death penalty inmates cost the state three times as much as an inmate serving a life sentence — around $2.3 million per case, according to DPIC data — because of the two-stage trial required to sentence someone to death, an extended jury selection process, automatic appeals processes and the unique facilities and security requirements to maintain a death row.
While it is unknown how many innocent people sit on death row today or have been executed, the DPIC estimates that for every eight people executed in the U.S., one person has been exonerated. Since 1973, 200 death row prisoners have been found wrongfully convicted. Eighteen of those exonerations have been for Texas prisoners, and over half of the overturned sentences were granted to Black defendants.
“Given all of this evidence, it does not require a great leap of faith to see that it is very likely we have executed people who were innocent,” Maher said.
More than half of the inmates sitting on death row today were sentenced by juries in Harris, Tarrant and Dallas Counties, and of Texas’ 254 counties, over 50% have never sentenced a person to death, said Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP).
Although Texas’ record for most executions in the U.S. is not closely contested, Cuellar says the times are changing. Five men were executed in 2025, a far cry from the Lone Star State’s peak of 40 executions in 2000. Two other men, one of whom is Roberson, received stays — a court order that suspends a planned execution. Harris and Tarrant counties are the only counties where prosecutors have pursued new death penalty sentences this year, the TCADP states, and at least one of those cases was rejected by a Tarrant County jury.
Only six new death penalty sentences were imposed statewide in 2024, and it is primarily defendants who were tried decades ago that now make up Texas’ death row population.
“The people on death row now who’ve been there for decades are part of this legacy of the death penalty,” Cuellar said. “That’s something we have to continue to confront, even as we acknowledge the fact that the death penalty has changed so significantly here.”
Jordan Maddox
The Abolitionists
It wasn’t until the Rev. Cheryl Smith was in her 60s that the death penalty moved from her “periphery” into full view. Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, she’d been exposed to conversations about civil rights, but it took her being assigned to lead a United Methodist church in Huntsville to really consider what it meant to live in a state that puts people to death.
It was an evening in 2011. She hadn’t been in town long and was driving to a meeting at the church when she drove past the Walls Unit. It was surrounded by people holding signs, and even though she’d never before witnessed the protest that takes place each time an execution is scheduled, she “immediately knew” what was about to happen.
“It just kind of hit me in the gut with the realization. Oh my gosh, they’re going to kill somebody on Main Street tonight,” Smith said. “That changed things for me from that evening on. I attended just about every single execution for the next four years that I lived in Huntsville.”
“The first execution I stood at was overwhelming,” she added. “I went to my car and just sobbed. I don’t sob every time anymore, but the feeling is the same. It’s disbelief, it’s sadness, it’s powerlessness, it’s anger. It’s a lot of things.”
Once Smith was transferred away from Huntsville, it became more difficult for her to attend executions, but she did when she could. Now retired, she stands vigil on the evenings when inmates are set to die, and she works alongside the TCADP on more formal advocacy efforts. Her opposition to the death penalty is rooted in her religious beliefs; she feels that executions come from a desire for the state to exercise vengeance, something that she believes Jesus taught against.
Her protests are often quiet, if not silent, and she wears her clerical collar because she “wants people to know there are people of faith” standing against the use of capital punishment. In the winter, when the sun has set by the time a 6 p.m. execution takes place, she holds a votive candle. At the end of each vigil, she rings a singing bowl once for each year the individual served on death row. Fourteen years after first coming to Huntsville, the experience remains “sobering.”
On one hand, Smith continues to be surprised that she is often the only religious figure present at the protests. On the other hand, she feels that conversations about capital punishment are still far from the mainstream. A common misconception about the abolitionist movement is that, by advocating for state-sanctioned executions to end, opponents are showing support for an aggressor rather than the victim. Smith says that “of course” she cares about victims and issues like crime, but she also cares about not expanding “the pool of people who are in grief.”
Smith recently agreed to serve as a spiritual adviser for a man on Texas’ death row. To her, there is little distinction between that work and her life’s ministerial calling to offer pastoral guidance when asked.
“You can describe redemption in lots of different ways, but [I believe] there is hope for people to be changed, if given a chance,” Smith said. “I know that my standing outside the Walls is not going to change anything. It changes me. It’s important to me to bear witness and to say, ‘I stand here and this is wrong.’”
If Smith’s method of protest is defined by her solemn observance, Linda Snyder’s is notable for her hands-on approach.
Snyder began protesting the death penalty in 2014, when she co-founded the group the Texas Death Row Angels alongside abolitionist Dani Allen. At the time, her husband’s brother-in-law was living on death row, marking the first time she’d had to confront the idea of capital punishment. When his sentence was changed to life in prison, he asked Snyder to keep in touch with his friends who’d become “like family to him.”
Living up to her brother-in-law’s wish, the Angels offer companionship to the men on death row through letters, calls and visits and help them obtain commissary items such as books or hygiene products. Snyder regularly welcomes family members of those on death row to her ranch house in Wortham, an hour south of Dallas, and coordinates airport pickups for out-of-state families.
The women also help pay for cremations after a person is executed if family members are either no longer around or decline to claim a body. They estimate they have paid for nearly a dozen cremations over the years.
If unclaimed after an execution, the state pays for cremation or burial, and the remains are buried at the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville. A 2014 Texas Observer report describes headstones in the cemetery labeled with “X,” “EX,” or “999” to designate, even in death, a prisoner who served on the row.
“Most of them don’t want their bodies on [Texas Department of Criminal Justice] property,” Snyder said. “We’ll do whatever they want with their ashes. We’ll send it to their family or, if they want their ashes spread somewhere, another state or a park or something, we’ll do that for them too. … It’s hard to be executed, and that kind of gives them a little bit of peace.”
Fighting the Stigma
While a majority of people sentenced to death row are men, the individuals who spoke with the Dallas Observer for this story believe that a majority of the people who protest the death penalty are women.
For decades, there has been a notable pattern of adoring women flocking to men who have committed heinous crimes. Serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were inundated with love letters after their crimes went mainstream, and Richard Ramirez, the rapist and killer known as the “Night Stalker,” actually married one of his fans.
These sorts of relationships have received little serious academic attention or research; the Wikipedia page for “hybristophilia” (a more official-sounding label than “prison groupie” or “Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome”) is 10 paragraphs long. But the trend has contributed to a cultural stigma that some of the women who protest Texas’ death row have found difficult to shake.
Allen experienced that stigma firsthand a decade into her journey as a death row advocate. She first found herself drawn to the abolition movement in 2005, a few years after she and her husband moved to Texas, and she took note of the number of executions happening. (In Allen’s first two years in the Lone Star State, 52 executions took place.) Despite having a history of violence in her family, she found herself thinking that “it seemed wrong” to allow executions because “you can’t kill someone to show that killing someone is bad.”
She began attending protests outside the penitentiary in 2011 (and has missed only one since), and in 2013, she began co-hosting The Prison Show, a radio program that reaches prisons in 45 states and offers justice system-related news updates, familial shout-outs and musical performances for inmates. The goal of the program is to help inmates feel “connected” with the outside world, a desire she came to intimately understand in 2015, when she first met Texas death row inmate Billy Wardlow.
Allen fell in love with Wardlow, and, after leaving her husband, the two became engaged in 2017. Their wedding was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Wardlow was executed after 25 years on death row in July 2020 for the robbery and murder of 82-year-old Carl Cole in East Texas, a crime he committed at age 18 in 1993.
“The stigma is so real, for not just being involved in a relationship with someone, but even the stigma of being friends with someone [on death row],” Allen said. “I was trying to help people on death row. I can’t tell you how many people I visit, both in the general [population] and on death row, and Billy was different. … When your minds connect, you can’t help that.”
Wardlow’s execution was one of five Allen has personally witnessed, a final act that cements her “every day” mission of ensuring the men on death row “feel loved in some way” and know they are not alone. But even after two decades of advocacy, there are some situations in which Allen still feels uncomfortable with the attention being a death row abolitionist brings.
In April 2022, Allen was a witness for the execution of Carl Buinton, who was sentenced for the 1990 killing of a Houston police officer. When she emerged from the death chamber, she was met not by the usual abolitionist protesters but by a “sea of police” who’d come out in support of the fallen law enforcement officer.
“They were staring at us like we were just beneath them, like we were crumbs,” Allen said. “It was horrible. They were yelling stuff at us. It was really bad.”
The Innocence Effect
Nearly every person interviewed for this article agreed that two recent cases have been instrumental in driving public attention toward Texas’ use of capital punishment: Melissa Lucio, who was found guilty in the death of her daughter and was the first woman of Latino descent to be sentenced to death in Texas before she was granted a stay in 2022; and Roberson, whose third execution attempt was scheduled for Oct. 16, 2025, before a court paused the sentence.
Roberson’s case, especially, has garnered an unusual amount of attention because of the widespread belief that he is innocent. The death of Roberson’s young daughter was argued to be caused by “shaken baby syndrome,” which, at the time of the prosecution, indicated child abuse but now falls under the supposed “junk science” definition that state law says should be enough to grant a retrial.
Roberson also fell under suspicion due to his sullen demeanor at the time of his daughter’s death, something that experts say can be attributed to his post-trial autism diagnosis. Even the lead detective who investigated Roberson has since recanted his stance, asking the state to grant clemency to the man who has spent 22 years on death row.
“I think Robert’s case shines a spotlight on the most egregious flaw of the death penalty, that it makes mistakes,” said Cuellar, the director of TCADP.
The legal thriller novelist John Grisham is writing a book about Roberson’s case, and NBC News’ Lester Holt has released a podcast exploring the controversy. Last year, Roberson was scheduled to be executed on Oct. 17, and instead spent “hours” alone and praying, out of the loop as the litigators argued back and forth over whether he could, or couldn’t, be killed.
The effort to save Roberson was notably bipartisan, spearheaded by Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody and the North Texas Republican state Rep. Jeff Leach, who staved off the execution by issuing a subpoena for Roberson to appear before the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence. Cuellar said that since 2019, the death penalty abolition movement has seen notable progress in the Texas House, passing bills related to due process and strengthening the junk science law that many believe failed in the Roberson case. Many of those bills, though, have died in the Texas Senate.
Prior to a stay being granted in Roberson’s case, Gloria Rubac told the Observer that, as each day passed, she felt herself growing more anxious about his impending death. The ability for people to hear personally from an individual on death row, such as Roberson, is crucial for humanizing the men whose lives hang in the balance, she believes.
That’s how it happened for her, at least. After being introduced by Clarence Bradley, she became close friends with Carlos Santana, a Dominican man who was executed in 1993 for being an accomplice in a fatal, million-dollar holdup, although he was not the one who committed the murder. According to a report by The New York Times, his final words were, “Love is the answer, not hatred.”
What Rubac remembers, though, are his final words to her. In his last hours, she stood 10 feet apart from him, separated by a theater curtain. At the time, the victim’s families were not yet welcomed into the death chamber, and his wife had returned to the Dominican Republic years before. “He had no family or friends” in the United States, besides Rubac.
“We were talking and talking and talking, and then the warden said, ‘Time’s up.’ And (Carlos) said, ‘Well, Gloria, before I die, just promise me one thing. That you’ll never stop fighting the death penalty,’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘Carlos, I promise.’ And I keep promises.”
After his execution, she had nightmares for a year. Rubac has thought of Santana at every execution she has attended for the last 32 years. Some days it gets easier. Some days it doesn’t. But she has never wavered in her belief that Texas doesn’t have the right to kill.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Texas has one execution scheduled so far for 2026. Rubac is sure to be there.
“A couple of days ago, when I got off the interstate and turned into Huntsville, I just got this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach,” Rubac said. “I just felt sick. And I thought, ‘God, I look forward to the day where I will never have to go to Huntsville again.’”
