James Broadnax was convicted in Dallas County in 2009 for the robbery and murder of two men in Garland. He is scheduled to die by lethal injection on April 30, 2026. His cousin, Demarius Cummings, has submitted a sworn affidavit confessing that he (not Broadnax) was the one who pulled the trigger. Cummings says he came forward specifically because of the approaching execution date.
I want to be clear about what that means procedurally, because the gap between what most people assume should happen in this situation and what the law actually requires is enormous. That gap is one of the strongest arguments against capital punishment.
What the Post-Conviction Process Looks Like in Texas
By the time a Texas death row inmate reaches an execution date, the direct appeal process is typically exhausted. The conviction has been affirmed. The state and federal habeas corpus petitions (the vehicles for raising constitutional claims and new evidence after trial) have been litigated and denied. What remains at the eleventh hour are extraordinary remedies, each with significant procedural barriers.
State habeas corpus — successor petition. Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 11.071 governs habeas proceedings in capital cases. After an initial habeas petition has been decided, a successive petition is barred unless the inmate can satisfy a demanding threshold: the claim must be based on facts that were unavailable at the time of the prior petition, and the facts, if true, would be sufficient to establish by clear and convincing evidence that no reasonable juror would have convicted the applicant. A confession from a co-defendant who did not testify at trial (submitted for the first time now) must clear that bar before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will even hear the underlying claim.
Federal habeas corpus. Under 28 U.S.C. §2254, federal courts reviewing state convictions are substantially constrained by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). A federal court generally cannot consider a claim that was not properly presented in state court. New evidence claims face the additional barrier of
Schlup v. Delo (1995) and House v. Bell (2006): to obtain federal review of an otherwise procedurally barred claim based on new evidence of innocence, the petitioner must show that it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have convicted them in light of the new evidence. This is a high standard and it is the gateway requirement before any constitutional claim can be heard on the merits.
Clemency. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles reviews clemency requests and makes a recommendation to the Governor. The Governor can grant a 30-day reprieve on their own authority. A full commutation or pardon requires a favorable Board recommendation. Texas’s clemency process has historically been difficult terrain for capital defendants: the Board rarely recommends commutation, and the process is largely non-transparent. In cases where innocence is credibly raised, clemency represents one of the few avenues that operates outside the procedural constraints of the courts.
Emergency stay applications. Broadnax’s attorneys and a coalition of prominent artists and advocates have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to pause the execution. An emergency stay application asks the Court to halt the execution while the underlying legal claim is reviewed. The standard for a stay in the capital context requires a showing that the underlying claim is substantial and that the balance of equities favors relief. Four Justices must vote to grant a stay. In cases involving last-minute new evidence, the Court has at times granted emergency relief and at other times allowed executions to proceed while review continues.
Why a Sworn Confession Is Not Automatically a Get-Out-of-Death-Row Card
People outside the criminal justice system often assume that a confession from another person claiming responsibility should immediately halt an execution. The law is considerably more skeptical of late-emerging confessions than that intuition suggests and for reasons that are not entirely unreasonable.
A person submitting a confession years after a trial, on the eve of a family member’s execution, is submitting testimony that cannot easily be tested. The original trial included cross-examination, jury evaluation of witness credibility, and the opportunity to present a full defense. A sworn affidavit submitted in a post-conviction proceeding bypasses all of that. Courts have seen fabricated post-conviction confessions. They have seen confessions motivated by misguided loyalty. They have also seen true confessions suppressed by the procedural barriers described above.
None of that means Cummings’s confession is fabricated. It means the legal system has erected procedural hurdles specifically because it distrusts late-emerging evidence and those hurdles do not lower because an execution date is approaching.
The Irreversibility Problem
This is the core of my objection to capital punishment as a defense attorney who has handled serious felony cases for more than 30 years.
Every other criminal penalty is, in theory, reversible. A wrongfully convicted person who serves time in prison can be released, compensated, and exonerated. They cannot get those years back, but the harm is not permanent in the absolute sense. An execution is permanent. If Broadnax is executed on April 30 and Cummings’s confession is subsequently verified, there is no remedy available. Texas cannot undo an execution.
The Innocence Project has documented more than 200 death row exonerations in the United States since 1973. The National Registry of Exonerations maintains a database of more than 3,400 exonerations across all offense types since 1989. These are not statistical abstractions. They are people who were convicted beyond a reasonable doubt by juries who heard the evidence and reached a verdict, and who were later established to be innocent through DNA evidence, recanted testimony, prosecutorial misconduct, or newly discovered evidence of the kind that James Broadnax’s attorneys are now presenting.
The question “how many of those exonerations would have been impossible if the person had already been executed” does not have a precise answer. That is exactly the problem.
What This Case Means for Dallas County
Broadnax was convicted in Dallas County. The Dallas County District Attorney’s office prosecuted this case. Whatever one believes about the ultimate question of his guilt, the elevation of Cummings’s confession by the U.S. Supreme Court application puts Dallas County’s capital case history in the national spotlight at a moment when the broader debate about Texas executions is already intensely active.
I have appeared in Dallas County courts for more than 30 years. I have seen what the criminal justice system does well and where it fails. The post-conviction process in capital cases is not designed for speed. It is not designed to be easy. It is designed to be final. When a confession this significant surfaces within weeks of an execution date, the appropriate response from anyone who takes seriously the irreversibility of the death penalty is to pause and evaluate the claim — not to proceed on schedule because the procedures say the clock has run.
Deandra Grant is the Managing Partner of Deandra Grant Law and has practiced criminal defense in North and Central Texas for more than 30 years.
