4 OctOber 23– 29, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents H untsville, Texas, 1982. Gloria Rubac remembers the thick crowd, primarily com- posed of students from Sam Houston State University, and the way they cheered outside the red-brick Texas State Penitentiary as the sun set. Hav- ing been a college student in Oklahoma in the 1960s and a staunch supporter of the anti-war and Civil Rights movements, Ru- bac 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 exe- cuted in Texas since 1964, and the first per- son 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 organiza- tion] Amnesty International came up to me and told me, ‘We’re having a silent protest,’” Rubac said. “I was like, ‘Silent? They’re get- ting ready to murder somebody. If I was be- ing 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. Brad- ley was one of the men who found the stu- dent’s body, and was found guilty by an all-white jury following racially charged tes- timony 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 newspa- per in addition to working as a school teacher, used her press credentials to visit Bradley while he was on death row. He in- troduced 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 cap- ital punishment because of the dispropor- tionate 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 sev- eral that protest. Some groups, like the one that invited Rubac to join on the night Brooks was killed, observe silently. Often- times, a smattering of Europeans observe the proceedings; many are pen pals or wives of inmates. For decades, Rubac and other organiz- ers who spoke with the Observer have felt frustrated by how little attention the aboli- tion movement has received from the gen- eral 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 exe- cutions are down, and the number of peo- ple being sent to death row are way down. So I think Robert’s case is important in drawing attention.” By the Numbers T he death penalty abolition movement dates back to America’s founding, with early political leaders like Thomas Jefferson weighing in on the sever- ity 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 Crimi- nal Justice data shows, reflecting what ap- pears 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 punish- ment, the way sentences are imposed arbi- trarily 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 in- mate 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 ex- tended 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 re- quire 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 | UNFAIR PARK | Pablo Iglesias Fighting For Life For the women who protest at Texas executions, progress is coming, but not fast enough. BY EMMA RUBY >> p6
