My brother was wrongfully convicted.
My wife is a police officer.
My sister is the former city attorney for Austin, Texas.
I have worked to free innocent people who were wrongfully convicted in Tarrant County and in the state more broadly.
I was not shocked — but still incredibly disappointed — when I heard about a new bombshell report issued by the Texas Defender Service that revealed Tarrant County’s aggressive pursuit of death sentences, especially and “almost exclusively” against people of color.
The Texas Defender Service, which authored the report, is an organization “dedicated to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in Texas through direct representation, policy reform, and public education.”
Titled “An Extreme Outlier: Race and the Death Penalty in Tarrant County, the Third Largest County in Texas,” the publication made significant waves in North Texas earlier this month. “At a time when most jurisdictions in Texas and around the country are moving away from the death penalty, the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office continues to seek the ultimate punishment at a remarkable rate, and almost exclusively against people from racial and ethnic minority groups,” said the group’s Executive Director Burke Butler.
Faith leaders and community activists expressed concerns about the findings — that Tarrant County threatens the death sentence as leverage in plea bargains and unfairly targets racial and ethnic minorities in death penalty cases — as The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported last week.
Rev. Ryon Price, the senior pastor of Broadway Baptist Church, said at a press conference that Tarrant County’s pursuit of the death penalty is “shocking in its frequency and absolutely abhorrent in its effect.”
Texas has executed 600 people since 1982, which is more than any other state by far. And as the report alleges, Tarrant County is an outlier even within a state universally acknowledged as the death penalty capital of the nation.
For context, across the globe, executions in 2025 soared to the highest figure recorded by Amnesty International since 1981, with 2,707 people executed in 17 separate countries. In a dataset published on Monday, the organization’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard said “a small, isolated group of countries willing to carry out executions at all costs” were the cause of a global spike she deemed “alarming.” Of course, the United States was included in that group, along with China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, and Singapore.
“This shameless minority are weaponizing the death penalty to instill fear, crush dissent, and show the strength state institutions have over disadvantaged people and marginalized communities,” said Callamard.
Ultimately, as the United States is a world leader in executions, and Texas has executed far more people than any other state, Tarrant County’s position as an “extreme outlier” is all the more concerning.
The report is confirmation of an unfair and abhorrent practice in Tarrant County that many of us unfortunately already suspected. The public believes that this is just the norm and how the criminal legal system operates, but this new evidence could be an opportunity to force change.
Tarrant County has accounted for nearly one-quarter of death penalty trials in Texas since 2020, even though it has only seven percent of the state’s population. Out of Texas’ 254 counties, only prosecutors in two, Harris and Tarrant, pursued new death sentences in 2025, according to the group.
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Ninety-two percent of the death sentences sought by Tarrant County prosecutors since 2012 have been against racial and ethnic minorities, even though 40% of Tarrant County’s population is white.
According to the report, racial discrimination is obvious in cases where the severity of the charges far exceeds the evidence to support those charges. It is a horrific practice known as “up-charging.” More than a quarter of Tarrant County capital murder cases during the past two decades resulted in a non-homicide conviction and ten percent of defendants received no jail time at all.
Up-charging is a common practice used to get convictions, but to see it used with capital charges — and not even result in any jail time — is another thing altogether. You must ask the question, “What is the motivation behind up-charging in that case when you know the death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the most heinous crimes?” The perverse thing is, you sometimes do get convictions out of it when you should not, because the charge is so serious that many people will just plead guilty to avoid the up-charge.
By any measure, it is an eye-opening report, and it is right here in my own backyard.
Up-charging on cases, which perverts the rule of law, and disproportionately targeting and intimidating people with the ultimate sentence of death, are all practices of the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office.
Texas Defender Service’s report makes it clear that the time has come to address these types of troubling practices that have been routinely used by the office for years.
What will it take to get the Tarrant County DA’s office to move away from using the death penalty as a hammer of threat? Shining a light on these practices is a first step toward making the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office a beacon of light for all district attorneys to follow — instead of an outlier for cruelty and racism.
Editor’s note: The views and opinions presented by guest contributors to The Barbed Wire do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the company, the newsroom, its staff, advisers, or advertisers.
