Charles Raby spends 24 hours a day in a 60-square-foot cell. Sometimes, if a friendly guard is working, he gets an hour of outdoor recreation time, alone, in a cage. Contrary to popular belief that segregated inmates get one hour of rec on weekdays, this only happens about twice a month due to staffing shortages.
There is black mold on the walls and he can hear the other men in 12 Building shouting grievances: it’s too hot, maggots have infiltrated the beans on the dinner tray, a fellow prisoner hasn’t flushed his toilet in weeks, and someone is smoking synthetic marijuana.
Like Groundhog Day, this routine has played out daily for 33 years.
Raby, found guilty of the 1992 attempted rape and murder of a 72-year-old grandmother. is one of 11 people convicted of Harris County murders who have been on Texas Death Row for more than 30 years, spending their days in solitary confinement, referred to by the state as “administrative segregation.” They were sent there — Allan B. Polunsky Unit for the men, Patrick O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville for the women — by Harris County prosecutors who have long since left office.
The victims’ families were promised that one day they’d see justice, death by lethal injection administered in Huntsville. But the Texas court system moves slowly and “closure” is an unattainable cliche, something people say to make a grieving loved one feel better.
While there are only 11 Harris County inmates who have been on death row for more than 30 years, cull the data a little more and you’ll find that 47 of the 64 Harris County offenders have been locked up for 20 years or more. Of those 64, two are women.
The high number of Houston-area inmates on death row troubles newly elected Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare for a few significant reasons:
- Several of the men and women on death row wouldn’t be facing execution for the crimes they committed years ago if they were prosecuted today.
- The staggering costs to taxpayers: at least $1 million to prosecute a death penalty case and about $4 million annually to house all death row inmates in Texas.
- Decades-long procedural delays make it more likely for an inmate to die of natural causes or have a sentence reduction than to die by execution.
According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, housing a death row inmate costs about $61.58 per inmate per day. That means Texas taxpayers are spending about $1.44 million in a single year on just the 64 Harris County death row prisoners.
The cost to prosecute a death penalty case is about $1 million but can be as much as $4 million when appeals and expert testimony are factored in.
And what if they get it wrong? Since 1985, Texas has paid $192 million to men and women who were wrongfully convicted, including those sentenced to death, according to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Harris County residents have said they don’t want to spend their tax dollars on death penalty trials, and that feeling would likely be more pronounced if they knew exactly how much it costs. A 2020 poll from Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research found that 20 percent of Houstonians support the death penalty when asked to assess options for those convicted of first-degree murder.
Teare said he doesn’t like Harris County’s reputation as the death capital of the world and he doesn’t want to aggressively seek executions the way at least one of his predecessors did.
“But in the current iteration of Texas law, there are people that the only way that I can ensure the safety of the community is the death penalty,” he said. “The question is, are you a future danger in the population you’re going to be in? In Texas law, if you get life without parole, you are in general population.”
The death penalty is not a deterrent, Teare says. “No corner store agg rob that turns into a capital [case] is ever stopped because the defendant says, I could get the death penalty if I pull the trigger. That doesn’t happen. No one who is a compulsive serial killer is like, ‘Oh, the death penalty, I won’t kill this person.’”
Setting a Conviction Record
Johnny Holmes went to work for the Harris County DA’s office about seven years before a U.S. Supreme Court decision lifted the national moratorium on capital punishment in 1976 and the death penalty was reinstated in 27 states.
Holmes, a Republican, spent a decade in the DA’s office, rising through the ranks, and was elected top prosecutor in 1979. He’d spend another 21 years as the district attorney before his 2000 retirement.
During his tenure — referred to as a “reign of terror” by some anti-death penalty advocates — Holmes secured more than 200 death sentences.
Prior to ‘05, there were just two punishment options on the table for capital murder sentences in Texas: life — which meant the possibility of parole after 40 years — and death.
“We were way behind the times in getting life without parole,” Teare says. “Now that we have life without parole, you’ve seen a consistent decrease in death penalty cases, to the point where now they’re reserved for the most dangerous, scariest people in the world.”
According to Teare, that includes Xavier Davis, who was sentenced to death by a Harris County jury last month even though he admitted guilt, indicating hope for a plea deal. Davis was convicted in the June 2021 murders of a couple and their 6-year-old daughter in the Brays Oaks neighborhood.
Another death penalty trial, that of Oscar Rosales, who is charged with the 2022 murder of a constable’s deputy during a traffic stop, will be prosecuted in a Harris County courtroom in June.
Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Executive Director Kristin Houle Cuellar has been in her role since 2008 and says a decline in death sentences can be attributed in part to high turnover among elected district attorneys, starting around 2014.
“That brought people with different perspectives and views on the criminal legal system,” she says. Prosecutors like Holmes, who saw death sentences as notches on their belts, were succeeded by attorneys who brought a different style of discretion, she adds.
Following Holmes was Chuck Rosenthal, who served from 2001 to 2008; Kenneth Magidson, who served briefly in ‘08 before becoming a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas; Pat Lykos; Mike Anderson; Devon Anderson; and Kim Ogg, who was elected in 2017 and ousted in the 2024 primary by Teare.
“In general, I think the majority of people on death row would not be there if they were charged with capital murder today,” Cuellar says. “That’s certainly true in Harris County. It is astounding to consider that in the 1990s, juries there were routinely sending 13 to 15 people to death row every year.”
The high numbers can be partly explained by Harris County’s population, which is among the largest in the United States. But it’s not all about the big city, Teare says.
“Some of it is not having life without parole for a long time,” he says. “You look at the number of death penalty cases that we tried after Johnny retired. It was significantly lower under Rosenthal and it was almost nonexistent under Lykos. I think we did two or three under the Andersons. We are a completely different community and entity now. These things take 20 to 30 years, so we’re at the point now where if we’re going to continue to be a leader in the death penalty, it’s not great. Not great is the biggest understatement. It’s terrible.”
It has to be considered, he says, that if some who have received a death sentence are given a new trial and a commutation is granted for life with the possibility of parole, the convicted individual “will walk out of the courthouse, a free person, because of the parole laws that are in place.”
However, a person sentenced to death prior to 2005 can’t be commuted to life without parole because it didn’t exist as an option when they were sentenced, Teare said.
“We legitimately have serial killers, that if we do not continue to seek the death penalty, we will open the front door of the Harris County Courthouse and they will walk out,” he said.
It’s impossible to discuss the death penalty in Harris County without mentioning Kelly Siegler. She was never the elected district attorney but served as a prosecutor from 1987 to 2008 with a penchant for death convictions, scoring 19 during her tenure. She’s been accused of operating a “snitch ring” to secure convictions, using jailhouse informants to provide what some say was false testimony.
But while she’s sent some men to death row, she also had a hand in setting one longtime prisoner free. While under fire with allegations related to the snitch ring, Siegler was assigned as a special prosecutor to re-try the Burleson County murder case of Anthony Graves who had been convicted of the murders of four children, their mother and their grandmother in Somerville in 1992.
Siegler found that Graves was wrongfully convicted and he was released in 2010 after an 18-year incarceration. Graves now lives in Houston and works as a criminal justice reform advocate. Charles Sebesta, the prosecutor who sent Graves to prison, was disbarred for concealing exculpatory evidence and using false testimony.
“In this small town, nothing like that had ever happened before,” Graves recently told students at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law. “The mayor of the town was so upset that she came out the next day and said whoever had done this did not even deserve a trial, that they should be caught and hanged. That’s kind of the way they pursued the case.”
Under pressure from law enforcement, Robert Carter, the father of one of the children who died, originally identified Graves as a co-conspirator but later recanted his testimony. About 70 percent of homicide exonerations involve perjury, false accusations or official misconduct, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Graves, who barely knew Carter, maintained his innocence throughout the process. It took four years for him to be released after his conviction was overturned by a federal appeals court. Texas taxpayers spent almost half a million dollars to house Graves for a crime he was later exonerated for, and upon his release, the state awarded him $1.4 million. Robert Carter was executed in 2000.
Other death row inmates have come close to freedom only to have it snatched away. U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison granted relief for death row inmate Ronald Jeffery Prible in 2020 on six separate claims that Siegler hid exculpatory evidence from the defense, provided undisclosed favors to prison informants in exchange for them fabricating false confessions, and violated Prible’s right to representation by using prison informants as agents of the prosecution to illegally question him while he was in custody.
Prible, convicted of capital murder in Harris County in 2002, remains on death row. A federal appeals court in 2022 restored his death sentence, vacating Ellis’ ruling and stating that Prible failed to raise issues sufficiently compelling to discredit his conviction and sentence.
When medical bills come due
Clarence Jordan, 69, has been on death row for almost 50 years, longer than Sean Teare has been alive, with no movement on a death date. Prison records show he’s no longer at Polunsky but rather at a medical unit in Huntsville.
Another death row prisoner, 56-year-old Brian Davis, suffered a massive stroke in September 2024. After spending 33 years at Polunsky, inmate records show Davis now resides at the medical unit in Huntsville.
Over the past five years, 32 people were removed from death row because they died of natural causes or their sentence was reduced. Of those cases, about 30 percent were tried in Harris County. During that same time period, 24 Texans were executed.
“It really begs the question of what are the citizens of Harris County even getting with all of these death sentences?” Cuellar says. “Why continue to put time and resources into prosecuting cases and seeking the death penalty when such a high number of those sentences are later changed for a variety of reasons? Execution is not a guaranteed outcome.”
Syed Rabbani sat in prison for almost 30 years after he filed an appeal challenging the constitutionality of a 1988 death sentence for the fatal shooting of a Bangladeshi immigrant at a Houston convenience store. Officials with the Harris County DA’s office announced at a 2023 resentencing hearing that they were no longer pursuing death, citing “some very serious mental and physical health issues affecting Mr. Rabbani some three decades after the capital murder.”
Rabbani is now eligible for parole based on time served but was denied in March based on the “nature of his offense” and was diagnosed with schizophrenia while incarcerated. Texas Department of Criminal Justice records show Rabbani, 59, is being held at a medical unit in Dickinson. Mental health facilities for incarcerated persons are in Rusk and Richmond.
Several Texas prisons offer more than cursory medical care, but inmates who require surgery or “complex inpatient” treatments are sent to John Sealy Hospital at Galveston’s University of Texas Medical Branch. About 230 beds are available for inmates, who are guarded by 340 armed officers. A $1.27 billion contract between the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and UTMB covers services for a two-year period that began in September 2023 and ends in August of this year. That’s another bill Texas taxpayers are footing.
A former death row inmate who asked to remain anonymous said he’s made a few trips to John Sealy and spent seven days at the Galveston hospital in 2008 because hurricane conditions temporarily halted movement. At the time, high-security inmates were not kept there for significant periods of time, but he believes protocols have since changed. An open records request seeking information on the number of inmates currently housed at John Sealy Hospital and whether any are death row prisoners was not filled by press time.
“Generally speaking, we would go in a van, we would pick up other [administrative segregation] inmates from other units and we would travel together,” the inmate said. “You wear your chains up to the fourth floor and you get put in a cell. They look like cells; they’re definitely not hospital rooms, and you sit there until your clinic appointment. That might be that day or it might be two days later. They come get you in a wheelchair and take you to the clinic.”
During a stay in the hospital, prisoners eat “Johnny sacks,” paper bag meals that usually consist of a sandwich. The prison wing of the building exclusively houses TDCJ inmates who have no interaction with members of the public.
“After your appointment, they take you back to the cell and wait for transport,” the inmate said. “If you’ve got a procedure, they have a couple of floors of hospital rooms that have locked doors. They are legitimate hospital rooms where you are chained to a bed. In the hospital room, you have a view of the bay. You can see the ships coming in and the seagulls. That’s still one of my best prison memories.”
While the state prison system spends a lot of money on medical care, discomfort and pain among inmates is common. It can take years to get a pair of eyeglasses or dentures. Back pain is common from sleeping on a hard bunk, performing outside labor or working in the kitchen or laundry facilities. Death row inmates aren’t permitted to have jobs but the sedentary lifestyle is also conducive to poor physical health, experts say.
Studies abound on the negative effects of solitary confinement on a person’s mental health. One segregated inmate described talking to and naming the roaches in her cell as practicing communication skills.
TDCJ officials say that Inmates with acute medical, mental health, or dental conditions receive special care and may be transferred to an appropriate facility for treatment.” Those with chronic conditions have inmate treatment plans developed within 30 days of diagnosis, which outline treatment goals and management. And finally, “Inmates can file grievances if they are not satisfied with the medical care they receive.”
TDCJ touts a compassionate release program, Medically Recommended Intensive Supervision, through which approved offenders can be granted early release if they are older than 65 and terminally ill. But you can’t qualify if you have a murder charge, a death sentence, a life without parole sentence, a sex offense or an immigration hold. Some exceptions have been made if the inmate is in a vegetative state, according to the Texas Prisons Community Advocates. The TPCA reports that 58 inmates were approved for compassionate release in 2022.
Former Houston resident Will Bolin befriended death row inmate Daryl Wheatfall through visits to the Polunsky Unit with a group of church volunteers. He said life is hard for his friend. The 83-year-old Bolin now lives in Nevada but talks to Wheatfall on the phone at least twice a week and saw him recently during a visit to Texas.
“He’s getting to where he’s not as mobile as he used to be,” Bolin said. “He really needs help, a wheelchair sometimes, to get to the meetings with his attorneys, but they won’t let him have one.”
Capital Cases Costly and Slow Moving
Just one Texas death date is pending in 2025. Matthew Johnson’s execution, filed by Dallas County, is set for May 20. Earlier this year, David Wood of El Paso County was granted a stay, a temporary delay to allow for more legal proceedings or the consideration of new evidence. It doesn’t mean the prisoner is set free or will not be executed. Steven Nelson of Tarrant County and Richard Tabler of Bell County were executed in February, followed by Moises Mendoza of Collin County on April 23.
An inmate’s family can claim the body post-execution; otherwise, they are buried at the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville with other unclaimed inmates who died in custody.
Teare has been on the job since January. He doesn’t have the authority to toss old cases out and set the captives free. But he can, when the old cases come up on appeal, determine whether “evolving standards of decency” come into play and agree with a Criminal Court of Appeals motion — or file his own — recommending relief from a conviction or a death sentence.
State and federal law constantly evolve. For example, a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision made it unconstitutional to execute persons under the age of 18. Prior to the law change, Texas executed 13 juveniles.
“There are changes in the judicial system that have real-life impact, and once someone is executed, there’s no way to address those issues,” Cuellar said. “Not only would so many of the people on death row not be there today because they would simply not be seeking the death penalty, but there are untold numbers of people who have been executed whose death sentences wouldn’t stand in this time.”
Death penalty cases must meet the criteria of capital murder, which can include a homicide during the commission of another crime, a child or law enforcement officer victim, and murder during an escape or attempted escape from a penal institution, among other things.
Most of Texas’ 254 counties don’t have a single death penalty case. County governments and their district attorneys recognize the massive costs associated with death penalty cases but often there is public or political pressure to get a conviction and death sentence.
“Each county pays for its own trials and the state appeals process,” according to a cost analysis produced by the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. “Smaller counties or those with fewer resources often cannot afford to seek the death penalty at trial. Some Texas counties have withheld employee raises and increased tax rates to cover the cost of an expensive death penalty trial.”
Teare said victims’ families are made aware that death penalty cases are slow and costly. The average time on death row prior to execution is 11.22 years, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
“This isn’t something that’s going to be done in two years or three years,” Teare says. “That’s a conversation you have with [the family] about the difference between the death penalty and life without parole. If you get life without parole, it’s over. They’re away from you; you get to move on. For the most part, and obviously you can’t speak in complete generalities, the families are very understanding that this is a decades-long process and they’re not clamoring for death dates.”
The DA’s office can request an execution date but the decision of who and when to execute is ultimately in the hands of the presiding judge and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Teare says.
Despite the resistance to death penalty cases in small, cash-strapped conservative Texas towns, Harris is most certainly a death penalty county, along with Tarrant, Bexar and Dallas. Those four counties are responsible for 49 percent of the executions in Texas.
Revisiting old convictions
Within days of winning the Democratic primary last year, Teare, 45, set up a new Conviction Integrity Unit, led by Division Chief Scott Pope, who worked for 12 years in the appellate division of the public defender’s office. Harris County has had Conviction Integrity Units before, but for the first time in Harris County, the CIU is tasked with reviewing death row cases and Pope reports directly to Teare.
Once appointed to his new post, Pope, 57, spent hours on the phone with Innocence Project officials and is already reviewing old death penalty cases tried in Harris County.
“He has carte blanche and an unlimited budget if he finds a case that needs to be looked at, to dig, to get all access to the entire state’s file, anything he needs, any people he needs to interview, whatever, regardless of the age of the case,” Teare says. “The first ones that I’ve asked him to look at were people on death row, obviously. If we get to a point where there is an exoneration or malfeasance by prosecutors then we are going to, by ourselves, facilitate a motion for a new trial or any type of habeas relief we can get to get it back into district court.”
“In the past, most of the involvement of the CIU has been waiting on writs to be filed and deciding whether we would oppose them or not at the Court of Criminal Appeals,” Pope says. “That’s one of the things I’m trying to formulate a way around. Certainly, we collaborate with defense attorneys when they are writing their writs. We’ll subpoena lab material like updated DNA or help gather evidence that was sealed. We can try to help locate a witness.”
Pope is also talking to authorities at the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs in Austin who work extensively on Texas death penalty and life without parole cases.
“They try to find evidence that was bad at trial, lying witnesses, lying cops, et cetera,” Pope said. He also reviews cases submitted by the public, which are likely to increase now that a form is available on the Harris County DA’s Office website. Pope’s small unit includes a paralegal, an attorney, an investigator and an information technology expert.
Getting a declaration of actual innocence based on new evidence is rare but proving a Brady violation is not. Teare says his office will be looking at both possibilities in the older cases. Established by the U.S. Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, a Brady violation occurs when the prosecution fails to disclose evidence that is favorable to the accused and material to their defense, violating the defendant’s right to due process.
To date in 2025, the DA’s office has already sent out more Brady notifications than the total sum issued last year. The wrong charges may have been filed in up to 300 criminal cases over the past five years, officials with the DA’s office confirmed last week. Brady violations also stem from the missteps of other agencies, Pope says.
“Suppose there is a detective at an agency who is mishandling drug evidence, forensic evidence like bullets or guns, or DNA samples. They’re making mistakes or they’re faking results or they lied on a questionnaire saying they were licensed to do a type of testing but they weren’t,” he says. “Whether or not it affects somebody’s case, one of the things we do is send out a Brady notice saying these things were known to have happened.”
Of the 64 Harris County death row inmates, particularly those who were prosecuted 20 or 30 years ago, some may be good candidates for resentencing, Harris County officials agreed.
Forensic science and DNA testing accuracy have evolved. If evidence from a murder committed decades ago still exists and can be retested, “that’s certainly a good way to get writs going to try to get someone off death row or just get an actual innocence claim in general,” Pope says.
Crime and punishment
About 37 percent of the 174 Texas Death Row inmates were sentenced in Harris County. Of the Harris County offenders, 36 are Black, 15 are Hispanic, 11 are white and one is Asian. The race of Ali Irsan, who is from Jordan, is listed as “other.” Twenty-two of the last 23 death sentences handed down in Harris County have involved men of color.
Cuellar said she thinks people are charged differently for similar crimes based on their race and the race of the victim. Out of 135 executions of Harris County offenders, 72 were Black men. Some of Harris County’s older death penalty cases are convenience store robberies that involved a murder but probably wouldn’t be classified among the most egregious capital cases if prosecuted today, she said. That resulted in “a lot of young Black men being sentenced to death, particularly in Harris County,” she added.
“I think there seems to be a different standard for crimes committed by people of color and crimes committed by white people,” she said. “I think there’s a history of racial bias in the administration of the death penalty, generally, but also particularly in Harris County where very similarly situated defendants received vastly different treatment in the criminal judicial system, resulting in many people of color being sentenced to death.”
Teare said he’s aware of the allegation of racial bias in Harris County’s pursuit of the death penalty. People of color have historically been “policed differently,” he says.
“I am committed to making this office the best in the world, and when it gets to that point, we’re all going to feel safer,” Teare said. “It’s not just the people on River Oaks Boulevard that are going to feel safer. It’s the people in Sunnyside and Pleasantville and South Houston, because we’re going to create a law enforcement ecosystem that takes care of everyone involved, so when someone in Sunnyside calls the police, they’re going to know that the police are on the way there and will protect them, not go next door and arrest their nephew for drugs because they need a felony conviction.”
It’s been said that life without the possibility of parole is worse than immediate execution; a death sentence is the easy way out. Teare says neither option sounds particularly enjoyable.
“I think it’s individual-specific,” he says. “When you talk about general population in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, that is a terrible way to live. At least you don’t have a date certain that you know your life is going to end. Living with that over your head, I can’t speak to what that does to a person’s psyche. When you’re on death row, there is much less day-in, day-out danger that you have to deal with than you do in general population. There’s not the prison gangs. You’re by yourself in a cell. It’s a safer way to live but you also have a date certain that your life is going to end.”
Texas Rep. Charles Dutton, D-Houston, has introduced a bill to abolish the death penalty every session for 40 years. He’s never even gotten a committee hearing but he said his efforts prompted the discussion that ultimately created a life without possibility of parole statute.
“Texas, typically, has been a conservative state even when it was controlled by Democrats,” Dutton told students at Thurgood Marshall School of Law in March. Many lawmakers believe Texas has to have a capital punishment statute “just because we’re Texas,” he said.
“One of my friends said it’s called the capital punishment statute because if you don’t have the capital, you get the punishment,” Dutton said. “I think that’s pathetic. Most of the convictions involve somebody who had limited resources.”
The state rep is now promoting House Bill 2237, which proposes reforming “the law of parties,” under which a person can be convicted of felony murder even if they weren’t present when the crime occurred but had knowledge of it.
House Bill 2055, filed by Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, would render those under 21 at the time of the crime ineligible for the death penalty. Additional legislation filed this session by Moody (HB 651), Rep. John Bucy III, D-Austin (HB 454), and Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin (SB 343) call for the elimination of the death penalty. The three bills, along with Dutton’s HB 2237, are either companions or duplicates and are pending in the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. None are expected to get out of committee in the Republican-controlled legislature.
Perpetually stuck in place
We reached out to most of the 11 longest-serving Harris County inmates, excluding those who don’t have access to a tablet for email. We heard back from Raby, Wheatfall, Billy Mason and Eugene Broxton.
It’s evident these men have experienced bouts of loneliness, anger, fear and boredom. Whether or not they are claiming innocence, they all want to go home. They’re old and unhealthy and they’ve already served 30-plus years in solitary confinement. Some of their letters are hard to follow, featuring specific details about a case and suggestions of reading material or who ought to be interviewed for more information.
When your primary method of communication with other humans is shouting through a vent or reciting an inmate number to the guard during count time, you forget your social skills, if you ever had any, Raby said.
Most of the older inmates on death row appear to understand that their circumstances aren’t likely to change instantly.
Pope said Texas, in general, is interested in keeping people on death row.
“Once you’re guilty, the law is designed to keep you guilty,” he said. “That’s why it’s so hard to file and win a motion for a new trial or an appeal or a writ.”
Raby, now in his mid-50s, spends his time researching trauma and early childhood development. He listens to Ray Charles, The Eagles, Janis Joplin and Conway Twitty on a prison-issued tablet, a new privilege provided to Texas prisoners a couple of years ago. Deprived of television for 24 years, he watched Avatar in 2021, staring through a window in his cell at a 60-inch TV in the prison dayroom.
“Blew me away,” he says. “I was amazed at the visual effects and technology. Amazing. I actually got motion sickness from watching it. Wasn’t used to so much movement.”
Over the years, he says he’s settled into a routine of low expectations for change and a mundane existence. His visits — with the exception of a female pen pal in Virginia who visits him once a year — are exclusively limited to his legal team. His father is incarcerated at a state prison in Richmond, eligible for parole in 2033. His mother died of complications from HIV in 2009. Support for longtime inmates wanes over the years as more interesting high-profile prisoners come to “the Row.”
Raby was 22 years old at the time of his offense. He has been at Polunsky for more than three decades. He said he hopes that new DNA evidence or claims of prosecutorial misconduct could turn his case around but hope is fleeting in the small cells in Livingston.
“Am I scared? Yes,” Raby says in a letter. “But not like when I first arrived here. I’m ready for the worst outcome. Hell, I’ve had 33 years to get ready. Right? But scared? Truthfully? Yes.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
