“After decades as the nation’s death penalty pariah, Texas was not the lead executioner this year,” the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty states in its annual report, “Texas Death Penalty Developments in 2025: The Year in Review.”
In 2025, seven executions were scheduled, five were carried out, and two people received stays of execution by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on claims of innocence. David Wood’s execution was stayed, after 32 years on death row, when he argued that the State had presented false testimony and suppressed exculpatory evidence, according to the report. Robert Roberson, convicted in 2003, was granted a stay by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals one week before he was set to be killed. TCCA sent his case back to the district court to reconsider his sentence in light of the fact that another person convicted based on the debunked theory of Shaken Baby Syndrome, the same crime prosecutors convicted Robert of, was exonerated last November by the CCA.
The report also points out the “notable” fact that 2025 saw prosecutors waiving the death penalty, “often with the consent of victims’ survivors, due to its exorbitant cost and the lengthy, uncertain legal process.”
But as is too often the case in death penalty states, “In Texas, whether a person receives a death sentence continues to be driven not by the underlying crime, but by geography. Prosecutors in only two of Texas’s 254 counties—Harris and Tarrant—pursued new death sentences in 2025, with juries sending three men to death row while rejecting the death penalty in a fourth case,” TCADP stated.