Wednesday was the second scheduled execution in the United States this year for a Texas man convicted of choking and assaulting a pastor in the Dallas region in his own church during a heist.
For the 2011 murder of Rev. Clint Dobson, 28, who was beaten, strangled, and smothered with a plastic bag inside NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington, Steven Lawayne Nelson received a condemnation. Despite being badly assaulted and left for dead, Dobson’s secretary managed to survive.
Nelson, 37, will be given a fatal injection at the state prison in Huntsville on Wednesday night. In addition to being the first of four death row inmates planned in Texas over the next three months, Nelson would be the first Texas death row inmate executed after Robert Roberson’s Oct. 17, 2024, execution date was postponed. This would have been the first in the United States linked to a shaken infant syndrome diagnosis.
On Friday, South Carolina performed the first execution in the country in 2025. In 2001, Marion Bowman Jr. was found guilty of murder in connection with the shooting death of a friend whose charred body was discovered in an automobile trunk.
As early as age six, Nelson, a laborer and high school dropout, had a lengthy history of arrests and legal issues. Nelson, who recently got married in incarcerated, has begged for forgiveness, saying that he was only a robbery lookout and that two other men were responsible for Dobson’s death.
Nelson, who had insisted that Dobson was still alive, testified throughout the trial that he waited outside the church for roughly twenty-five minutes before entering and seeing the beating of Dobson and Judy Elliott. Nelson claimed to have taken Dobson’s laptop and to have received Elliott’s credit cards and car keys from one of the other males.
Elliott’s husband, the church’s part-time music pastor, later located the victims. She had been battered so badly that he didn’t recognize her right away.
Trial evidence included security footage of Nelson using Elliott’s credit cards and driving her car, Nelson’s fingerprints and parts of his broken belt at the crime scene, and drips of the victim’s blood on his footwear. The two men Nelson accused of carrying out the attack, according to investigators, had alibis: One of them was located 30 miles (48 kilometers) away using phone records, and the other man was located in a chemistry class using phone records and a sign-in sheet.
Nelson’s lawyers filed an appeal citing poor legal representation during his trial and sentencing, claiming that the attorneys failed to provide mitigating evidence of a traumatic upbringing in Oklahoma and Texas or to contest the other men’s alibis. State and federal courts have rejected his appeals, and on January 28, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected a stay of execution. In order to have additional time to contest Nelson’s conviction, his lawyers requested last week that the U.S. Supreme Court step in and stop his execution.
Nelson was charged with the murder of another prisoner while he was awaiting trial. After being found guilty and given the death penalty, he was never tried on that accusation.Nelson damaged a water pipe in a holding cell during his trial, causing the courtroom to fill with nasty black water, and he also broke an electric shock cuff off his ankle. Additionally, he routinely used a key concealed in his genitalia to unlock his ankle restraints and handcuffs.
Before the end of April, three more executions are planned in Texas.
February 13 is the date of the first. After killing a strip club manager and the manager’s buddy during Thanksgiving weekend in 2004, Richard Lee Tabler was found guilty. Tabler also admitted to murdering two club dancers. Despite being accused of killing them, he was never put on trial.