A British woman has spoken about the loss of her husband, an inmate who was executed in Texas in April, after what she says was a failure to act on new evidence. The woman, Tiana, said simply that Texas had got it wrong, describing a long-distance relationship that ended only weeks after the couple were married.
Tiana said she met her husband, James, around two years ago, and that the two married in April after a long-distance romance. James was a death row inmate in Texas at the time, and the wedding took place on April 14, a little over two weeks before the date set for his execution.
James had been convicted of the murder of two men outside a recording studio in Dallas. He had initially confessed to the killings and, at the time, boasted that he felt no guilt over what had happened. His lawyers later argued that he had been under the influence of drugs when he made those early statements to investigators.
The case against him also drew on unusual material. Prosecutors used rap lyrics that James had scribbled in notebooks to help secure a death sentence, presenting his own written words as part of the argument for imposing the ultimate punishment on him at trial.
In the period before the execution, the case took a dramatic turn. James's cousin, Demarius, who is also behind bars, recently admitted that he was the one who had pulled the trigger. Tiana said DNA taken back in 2008 and used at the original trial matched what Demarius admitted on March 11, which in her account confirmed that his confession was true.
Despite that development, the courts did not step in. The family had hoped for at least some form of investigation or a reprieve based on the new evidence, but the Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch appeal. James was executed on April 30 and pronounced dead at 6:47pm, becoming, by the account given, the 599th person put to death on death row in the state of Texas.
For Tiana, the road to that case had begun with her own studies. She said she had finished a law degree with a strong grade and had gone on to a master's, driven by a long-standing interest in human rights and in racial disparities and racism within the criminal justice system. That interest, she said, led her to look beyond the United Kingdom and eventually to the man she would go on to marry.