CREATORS: One of the Worst Court Decisions in History

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 12, 2026

The U.S. government detained and deported 25-year-old Brian Jose Morales Garcia to Mexico in April. That doesn't sound like breaking news in 2026, except Garcia was born in Denver.

Garcia told The Texas Tribune that he explained to police and immigration agents that he was a U.S. citizen and that he had a copy of his birth certificate and his Social Security card at his home in Austin, Texas. It didn't matter; he was shipped to Mexico.

Garcia's name may not long be remembered, but the government's disregard for individual rights and contempt for human rights will not soon be forgotten.

Some would like to pretend, or maybe don't know, that this conduct is not unprecedented. There was a time in this country when the government incarcerated thousands and thousands of American citizens who were not accused of a crime with the imprimatur of the highest court in the land.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, former President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. military to remove over 120,000 people of Japanese descent, the majority of whom were American citizens, from their homes and force them into American prison camps throughout the United States.

After Pearl Harbor, Japanese American Fred Korematsu tried to join the military and was turned away because of his ancestry. He was later fired from his job for the same reason.

Korematsu was arrested for failing to evacuate to a prison camp. He was convicted and Korematsu and his family were interned in Topaz, Utah, where the government had set up one of 10 prison camps.

Korematsu appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found "That there were members of the group who retained loyalties to Japan has been confirmed by investigations made subsequent to the exclusion. Approximately five thousand American citizens of Japanese ancestry refused to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and to renounce allegiance to the Japanese Emperor and several thousand evacuees requested repatriation to Japan."

As a result, in December 1944, the high court ruled 6 to 3 against Korematsu, declaring that the incarceration was not caused by racism — it was justified as a "military necessity."

Justice Robert Jackson, who would later prosecute war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany, complained about the lack of any evidence to justify the incarceration, writing: "the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination ... The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

It turns out that Justice Jackson was right. It wasn't just that the government didn't have evidence; the evidence that was presented was knowingly false and misleading. The real evidence was hidden from Korematsu, his lawyers and the Supreme Court.

According to the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, as the Department of Justice began searching for evidence to support the Army's claims that Japanese Americans were a threat, they "found precisely the opposite — that J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, the FCC, the Office of Naval Intelligence and other authoritative intelligence agencies categorically denied that Japanese Americans had committed any wrongdoing. These official reports were never presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, having been intentionally suppressed."

Ultimately, after nearly 50 years, Korematsu's conviction was overturned based on the misconduct of the government's attorneys. In a statement as important today as it was in 1942, Korematsu told the court after his conviction was overturned, "According to the Supreme Court decision regarding my case, being an American citizen was not enough. They say you have to look like one ... I thought that this decision was wrong and I still feel that way. As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing."

The Korematsu decision was the law of the land for 64 years. The decision was generally considered one of the worst decisions in American history. The decision was formally overturned in 2018.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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NYPD no longer reviewing all stop and frisk encounters as required by court order

More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal.

But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for a key part of an aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers, reported ProPublica.

The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision.

In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor.

The failure involved the Community Response Team, or CRT. A ProPublica investigation last year found that the unit had often sidestepped oversight as it went after so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs. The team’s tactics, including high-speed car chases, and its opaque operations disturbed some NYPD officials, but the unit expanded significantly amid the support of then-Mayor Eric Adams.

The lack of reviews is part of a pattern of the NYPD failing to deliver on its obligations under the long-standing court order. Officers across the department, for instance, have often not documented stops.

The importance of reviews is particularly critical for aggressive teams like the CRT, which has a record of unconstitutional stops. It has also drawn hundreds of civilian complaints since it was created three years ago. More than half of the officers assigned to the team have been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of board data last year. That compares with just a small fraction of NYPD officers overall.

Prior to its latest discovery, the federal monitor had raised alarms about the unit’s behavior. A report last year said that only 59% of stops, searches and frisks by CRT officers were lawful, a far worse rate than the NYPD’s patrol units. Nearly all of the stops involved Black or Hispanic residents.

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Snyder: A new vision of how criminal JUSTICE might work

 Rachel Louise Snyder writes in The New York Times:

The avenues that lead women to jail tend to differ from those for men. Criminologists have long understood this. What happens with women is often a layering of trauma and abuse. They might have economic instability or mental health challenges that allow them to be exploited by violent partners. They might exchange sex for food or housing, and then get arrested for any number of infractions: prostitution, trespassing, drugs. The criminal-justice researcher Stephanie Kennedy calls these “crimes of survival.”

These avenues have contributed to shocking rates of incarceration for women: Between 1978 and 2015, the number of women in state prisons has grown by 834 percent. The overwhelming majority are primary caregivers. When a woman goes to prison, the downstream effects can be staggering: children might enter foster care, itself often a traumatic system. Aging parents might be put into subpar facilities, or have to find alternative care and housing. All too often, the cost of such upheaval results in a cycle of crime, incarceration, addiction, poverty and broken families.

Courts have long struggled with how to respond. The question is: Can we create a system of justice that looks wholly different from what most of us imagine when it comes to crime and punishment, while still demanding accountability from perpetrators? What if court were a place that afforded someone the opportunity for a complete reset, with entryways to jobs, housing, education? What if instead of punishing people who’ve been broken many times over, we helped to heal them?

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Bail reform being dismantled across the country

According to the  Marshal Project, in 2021 the Illinois' legislature passed a bill abolishing cash bail and replacing it with a system in which prosecutors can seek detention based on public-safety or flight-risk findings. At the time, the rationale for the change was largely built on questioning the logic of wealth-based detention. Commenters argued that a rich person should not have a special right to leave jail compared to a poorer person accused of the same crime.

Earlier this month, after the killing of a Chicago police officer whose alleged shooter had been released on electronic monitoring while awaiting trial in another case, Republican lawmakers renewed calls to change the law, arguing in part that the state needed to come into line with President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting “cashless bail.” But the plans that have been floated have not sought to restore money bail, but rather proposed new means of revoking pretrial release, or creating a presumption of detention for people with violent convictions.

Similar legislative efforts to increase pretrial detention outright have also gained momentum across the country. In New Hampshire, a rollback of the state’s earlier bail reforms lowered the standard prosecutors must meet to deny bail, and state officials have pointed to rising jail populations as proof the new approach is working. Later this month, voters in Alabama will decide whether to expand the list of charges for which judges can deny bail. Similarly, in November, voters in Indiana will vote on a constitutional amendment that would dramatically expand judges’ ability to hold people pretrial if they determine that no conditions of release could reasonably protect public safety.

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Once vaunted DOJ needs incentives to find new talent

 

The Justice Department is taking a new tack to overcome hurdles in attracting qualified legal talent and to prevent current lawyers from leaving: offering signing and retention bonuses throughout the Civil Division, reported Bloomberg Law.

New vacancy postings show signing bonuses of $25,000 are newly available to staff offices investigating youth transgender treatments and litigating the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

The financial enticements are an apparent first for a department that in previous years would be inundated with resumes from lawyers willing to take significant salary reductions compared to private sector legal practice. Padding lawyers’ biweekly paychecks signals a division growing more desperate to stave off further departures of valuable legal minds, including those who’ve expressed discomfort with defending the president’s policies from a slew of lawsuits.

Further, the head of the Civil Division—which plays a crucial role advancing and protecting the president’s policies in court—informed all his attorneys Monday that they’ll begin receiving a “retention incentive allowance” ranging from around $60 to $220 every pay period through Thanksgiving, according to an internal email reviewed by Bloomberg Law.

Trial attorney vacancies posted on DOJ’s website Tuesday for the Civil Division’s recently created enforcement and affirmative litigation branch describe in bold print “a signing bonus of up to $25,000" that may be awarded to “well-qualified candidates.” The job advertisements, which would support a DOJ team that’s been repeatedly losing in court over efforts to subpoena pediatric hospitals for sensitive data on minors prescribed drugs for gender dysphoria, instruct applicants that time is of the essence.

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Autocracy Watch: Undermining the Integrity of the midterm elections

Perhaps nothing better reflects the breakdown of the guardrails that thwarted President Trump’s rashest impulses in 2020 than his creation last fall of a special White House post reinvestigating his loss to Biden, reported ProPublica. 

In December 2020, just days after AG William Barr rebuffed Trump’s Antrim County claims, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office helped prevent the president from heeding activists’ call to essentially declare martial law to seize voting machines. This multihour shouting and cussing match has been called the craziest meeting of the first Trump administration.

But the lawyer whom Trump hired in 2025 as his director of election security and integrity, Kurt Olsen, had worked to overturn Trump’s loss in court in 2020 and was later sanctioned by judges, including for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections.

Olsen’s work in the second Trump administration has breached the firewall between the White House and DOJ officials, established after Watergate to prevent law enforcement officers from making decisions based on political pressure, said Gary Restaino, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona.

“This is not a constitutional or even a statutory requirement,” Restaino said, “but it’s a democracy requirement to make sure that citizens throughout America understand that decisions about life and liberty are being made in an objective and consistent manner.”

In a previously unreported series of events, around the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Olsen wanted the FBI to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, and gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown and his team emphasized to Olsen that any investigation his team did would be independent and fair. 

When Brown and his team examined the report, they found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether, and concluding that others came down to human error, not criminal wrongdoing. The report had been assembled by a longtime ally of Olsen’s and participant in the Election Integrity Network who had a history of discredited claims, ProPublica has reported.

Based on their own investigation, Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors at DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted.

Soon after, Brown was offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office, people with knowledge of the exchange told ProPublica. 

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”

Brown’s ouster after refusing to carry out the seizure of 2020 election materials has been reported, but Olsen’s involvement and the details of their interactions leading to Brown’s retirement have not been previously disclosed. 

With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement. 

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CREATORS: If at First You Don't Succeed, Indict Again

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 5, 2026

The acting Attorney General of the United States, Todd Blanche, has announced the indictment of former Director of the FBI, James Comey. In any other administration, this would be huge news.

America reacted to the indictment with a yawn. This is the second time, and the second attorney general to appear at a press conference and announce the indictment of Comey. The first indictment didn't go so well for the Trump administration.

Days before Comey's first indictment, he was singled out by name in a social media post wherein President Donald Trump appeared to appeal directly to the Department of Justice to bring charges against Comey and complained that investigations into his political enemies had not resulted in criminal charges.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the first indictment based on allegations that Comey lied to Congress five years prior during remote testimony about Russian interference in the 2016 election. A federal judge dismissed the case, finding that the acting U.S. Attorney who sought the indictment was unlawfully holding her position and lacked authority to do so.

If possible, the second indictment is more suspect than the first. Comey was investigated last year over an Instagram post of a photograph of seashells in the sand on some sunny beach. The shells were aligned in the figures of "86 47." With the image, Comey wrote: "Cool shell formation on my beach walk."

According to NBC News, "the term '86' is used in the restaurant industry, and it can informally mean 'to get rid of.' The number '47' was thought to be related to Trump, the 47th president.

The indictment claims that a "reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances" would interpret the seashell image as "a serious expression of intent to do harm to the President of the United States."

This past Sunday, the acting Attorney General appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press," where he gave "assurances" that not everyone who posts the "86 47" message will be charged with threatening the president.

"That phrase is used constantly," according to Blanche, " ... every one of those statements do not result in indictments." Apparently, only avowed enemies of President Trump will face indictment for posting "86 47" online.

Let's start our examination of this indictment with the Fox News comments of George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley. If you don't know Turley, let's just say you won't find his name on a Trump enemy list, making his comments all the more surprising.

Turley told Fox, "If Comey is charged for the shell picture, it would face a monumental challenge under the First Amendment," Turley said. "In my view, the image itself is clearly protected speech. Absent some other unknown facts or elements, it would be unlikely to survive a constitutional challenge."

This time, Comey is charged with making a threat against the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. Those charges require the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the former FBI director "knowingly and willfully" issued a threat to "take the life of" the president.

The Conservative podcaster Glenn Beck said recently, "If the seashell thing is the best the D.O.J. has on Comey, we're in trouble."

Alexis Loeb, a former DOJ deputy chief, told The Hill that the term "86" is open to different interpretations. "In the typical case — again, because the government's burden is to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt — you typically wouldn't see threats that are readily open to non-violent interpretations."

The pattern of multiple indictments against Comey is certainly an issue that Comey's defense team will raise. There is clearly an opportunity to argue vindictive prosecution or the weaponization of the Justice Department to settle a score with one of the president's enemies.

However, it may never get to that — Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who specializes in First Amendment law, told CNN, "This is not going anywhere. This is clearly not a punishable threat."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Mangino discusses murder and dismemberment case on WFMJ-TV21

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Report: Public perception of crime often diverges from reality

Americans’ views on crime often don’t match reality — and a new report suggests those perceptions are shaped as much by personal experiences and economic conditions as by crime itself, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star..

The analysis, released by the nonprofit think tank Council on Criminal Justice, draws on decades of Gallup survey data to examine how people perceive crime and what drives those beliefs. The report’s authors found that, since the 1960s, public perceptions of crime have frequently diverged from actual crime trends.

Even during periods when crime declined, most Americans continued to believe it was rising. From 2005 to 2024, about 69% of survey respondents on average said crime was higher than the year before, despite overall crime rates falling in most of those years, according to the report.

Fear of crime has remained relatively stable over time. In 2024, 35% of Americans said they were afraid to walk alone at night — the same share as in 1968.

The researchers found that public concern tends to track major shifts in homicide rates more closely than broader crime trends. But overall, people’s views about crime and their fear of it have not matched shifts in crime rates for most years, according to the report.

Instead, the analysis points to other factors that shape how Americans think about public safety.

Household victimization — whether someone in the home has been a victim of a crime — was one of the strongest predictors of both fear and the belief that crime is increasing. 

Property crimes, such as theft, and people’s own experiences with crime were more closely tied to concerns about the issue than actual violent crime rates.

Economic sentiment also played a role. People who said it was a good time to find a job or expected to spend the same or more on holiday shopping were less likely to say crime was rising and less likely to report fear of walking alone at night, according to the report.

Political views showed a more limited effect. While people with more conservative ideologies were somewhat more likely to perceive crime as increasing, political party affiliation itself was not a significant factor after accounting for economic conditions and other variables.

Higher presidential and congressional approval ratings were associated with a greater likelihood that respondents said crime was staying the same or declining, according to the report.

Local conditions, meanwhile, were more closely linked to personal fears than to perceptions of crime overall. The researchers found that neighborhood factors, such as poverty and youth population, were associated with whether people said they were afraid, but did not generally influence whether they believed crime was rising locally or nationally.

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Trump Administration regularly defies court decisions

When a federal judge shot down a Trump administration policy of holding immigrants without bond last December, it seemed like a serious blow to the president’s mass deportation effort, reported The Associated Press.

Instead, a top Justice Department official insisted the ruling wasn’t binding, and the administration continued denying detainees around the country a chance for release.

By February, the district court judge, Sunshine Sykes, was fed up. Sykes, a nominee of President Joe Biden, accused Trump officials in a ruling that month of seeking “to erode any semblance of separation of powers,” adding that they could “only do so in a world where the Constitution does not exist.”

Hardly isolated, the case illustrates a broader pattern of defiance of lower court decisions in President Donald Trump’s second term.

The failure of Trump officials to follow court orders has been highlighted most notably in individual immigration cases. But a review of hundreds of pages of court records by The Associated Press also shows an extraordinary record of violations in lawsuits over policy changes and other moves.

In the second Trump administration’s first 15 months in office, district court judges ruled it was violating an order in at least 31 lawsuits over a wide range of issues, including mass layoffs, deportations, spending cuts and immigration practices, the AP’s review of court records found. That’s about one out of every eight lawsuits in which courts have at least temporarily blocked the administration’s actions.

The Republican administration’s power struggle with federal courts — which is testing basic tenets of U.S. democracy — reflects an expansive view of executive authority that has also challenged the independence of federal agencies, a president’s ethical obligations, and the U.S.’s role in the international order.

President Donald Trump walks from Marine One to board Air Force One at Ocala International Airport, in Ocala Fla., Friday, May 1, 2026, after speaking at an event in The Villages, Fla. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Judges find widespread noncompliance

The violations in the 31 lawsuits are in addition to more than 250 instances of noncompliance judges have recently highlighted in individual immigration petitions — from failing to return property to keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates.

Legal scholars and former federal judges said they could recall at most a few violations of court rulings over the full four-year terms of other recent presidential administrations, including Trump’s first time in office. They also noted previous administrations were generally apologetic when confronted by judges; the Trump administration’s Justice Department has been outright combative in some cases.

“What the court system is experiencing in the last year and a half is just qualitatively completely different from anything that’s preceded it,” said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University who studies federal courts and is tracking litigation against the Trump administration.

Though Trump officials eventually backed down in about a third of the 31 lawsuits, legal experts say their treatment of court orders poses serious dangers.

“The federal government should be the institution most devoted to the rule of law in this country,” said David Super, a constitutional law scholar at Georgetown University. “When it ceases to feel itself bound, respect for the rule of law is likely to break down across the country.”

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The Truth or Derek Podcast

 

Great to join The Truth or Derek Podcast.

Mangino joins Angenette Levy on Law and Crime's Crime Fix

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Comey indicted again, the clown show continues

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has become the second Justice Department leader in seven months to secure an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey, a longtime target of President Donald Trump’s ire. And Trump is happy with Blanche's performance in the job, according to a person familiar with the discussions, reported NBC News.

Comey appeared briefly in court Wednesday on the latest charges. This time, the indictment accuses him of making a threat against the president when he posted a photo of seashells arranged to read “8647" on Instagram in May.

Comey's Instagram post. He later took it down.@comey via Instagram

The first indictment, under former Attorney General Pam Bondi, was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia over an allegation that Comey lied to Congress five years ago during remote testimony via Zoom. A judge dismissed that case, finding that the acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan — a Florida insurance attorney with no prior prosecutorial experience — was unlawfully holding her position and had no authority to seek the indictment in the first place. Comey maintains his innocence in both cases.

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Mangino discusses settlement of Ursuline High School civil rights suits

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Florida and Texas carry out executions on the same day

 The 9th and 10th Executions of 2026

Florida executed James Hitchcock, 70, by lethal injection on April 30, 2026, for the 1976 rape and strangulation murder of his 13-year-old step-niece Cynthia "Cindy" Driggers. It was Florida's sixth execution of 2026, reported Florida Today.

An hour later, Texas executed James Broadnax. He received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. It was the third execution in Texas this year. Texas and Florida are responsible for nine out of the ten executions this year, reported The Associated Press.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution request for Hitchcock earlier in the day.

In the early morning hours of July 31, 1976, Hitchcock raped Driggers, who was just three days shy of her 14th birthday, at his brother's home in Winter Garden and strangled her to death. In a confession to police, which he later recanted, Hitchcock said he killed the teen to keep her from telling her mother what he'd done.

Hitchcock's final words were, “Just to say goodbye to Joshua my friend. Thanks for all you’ve done." the Associated Press reported.

Hitchcock's death sentence was carried out at 6 p.m. in the execution chamber at Florida State Prison near Starke. He was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m.

He had a last meal that included chicken, salad, ice cream, pie and soda, Florida Department of Corrections spokesman Jordan Kirkland said during an afternoon news conference.

Following the execution, Cindy Driggers' family members spoke to the media, remembering Cindy and the toll of retrials and decades of waiting for justice. Several thanked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for signing Hitchcock's death warrant and finally receiving justice after 50 long years and expressed the need for executions to be expedited.

"I grew up watching my mother and her brothers and family endure the weight of this loss," Tanya Clement said while holding up a framed photo of her aunt Cindy. "The appeals, the retrials, three additional trials. These weren't just events in a case, they were part of my childhood. I witnessed the emotional toll firsthand, even at a young age, it became a defining part of who I am."

"Our family has been through so much, but we stand here together strong, united and unwavering for my aunt Cindy," she continued. "She is often spoken about, remembered deeply and I see pieces of her in my own children."

"Her presence lives on through all of us. Today we remember her, we honor her and today we are finally witnessing justice for her life – hard-found, long-awaited and she is never forgotten."

"First I want to focus on Cindy," her younger sister Lynn Cobb. "She was a beautiful, kind and sweet sister. Most saw her as shy and timid. She was so much more than that."

"We had dreams of airline stewardesses together where we were going to travel the world and experience it all together. God blessed us with 13 short years, our lives were better for it. Cindy added life, fun and dreams."

"Thank you, Gov. DeSantis, to you and your staff, that have listened and pushed for justice to be given for Cindy," she said.

"We now close this door on this chapter of our lives."

"I can breathe today, I am loving life," Chip Meadows, Cindy's cousin, said. "Free at last, free at last, our monster is dead. Free at last."

"There's not many people who would have made it through 50 years being drug through agony, frustration, anger," Cindy's cousin Ginie Meadows said. "You just can't find the words."

"The spirit of James Ernest Hitchcock need not be looking for the kingdom of God, because the gates into heaven are narrow. He will never, ever get through them. It is my hope, in fact, that his spirit has now arrived into the bowels of hell."

She also thanked DeSantis, saying, "With your signature on his death warrant, the 50-year saga of Hitchcock has now become history."

"I am believing in you, sir, to continue to make strides in honing in on the process of cleaning out death row," she said, adding that future governors "must be willing to follow the precedents as set forth by Gov. DeSantis concerning the signing and execution of death warrants for those that have earned them. If you are on death row, you've earned it."

"For those of you that just simply do not understand why this process is justified, I am certain that you do not know the agony and emotional turmoil and torture of having someone you love brutally murdered."

In Texas, James Broadnax, who claimed he wasn’t the shooter in a fatal robbery that killed two people nearly 18 years ago and who said prosecutors misused rap lyrics he wrote to secure his death sentence was also executed on April 30, 2026.

Earlier Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request by Broadnax’s attorneys to stop his execution.

He was condemned for the 2008 shooting deaths of two men outside a suburban Dallas music studio. Prosecutors say Broadnax and his cousin, Demarius Cummings, fatally shot and robbed Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler in the parking lot of Butler’s recording studio in Garland. Cummings was sentenced to life without parole.

Broadnax was defiant in a final statement in which he also sought forgiveness from the victims’ relatives. Seven relatives, including parents of each of the victims, were present.

“I prayed to God for your forgiveness,” he said, when asked by the warden if he had a final statement. “Despite what you think about me, I hope to God that prayer was answered. But no matter what you think about me, Texas got it wrong. I’m innocent, the facts of my case should speak for itself. Period,” he said.

The execution also was punctuated by screams of “I love you” from his wife, who also was among witnesses to the punishment. She was emotional at times during the procedure, leaning up to the death chamber window with arms spread, and had to be helped out of the prison.

As the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began, Broadnax urged his supporters to keep fighting. “Don’t give up,” he said, and was stopped in another mid-sentence by a gasp. He shook his head briefly and all movement stopped. He was pronounced dead 21 minutes later, at 6:47 p.m. CDT.

Prosecutors said Broadnax, 37, confessed to the shooting, telling reporters during jailhouse interviews that “I pulled the trigger” and that he had no remorse.

His lawyers had focused his final appeals on two issues: Cummings had recently confessed to being the shooter; and Broadnax’s constitutional rights were violated because prosecutors eliminated potential jurors during his trial on the basis of race.

“I’m really gonna tell it like it’s supposed to be told, that it was me, that I was the killer. I shot Matthew Bullard, Steve Swan,” Cummings said recently from prison in a video created as part of the efforts to stop Broadnax’s execution.

His attorneys also alleged prosecutors dismissed all seven potential Black jurors on the basis of their race, “utilizing a spreadsheet during jury selection that bolded only the names of every Black juror,” according to court documents. One Black juror was later reinstated to the jury. Broadnax was Black.

In a 1986 ruling known as Batson v. Kentucky, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that excluding jurors because of their race violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Broadnax’s attorneys had argued in an earlier appeal that prosecutors had violated his constitutional rights by using some of the rap lyrics he wrote to portray him as a violent and dangerous person in order to secure a death sentence. A number of A-list rappers, including Travis Scott,T.I. and Killer Mike, had filed briefs at the Supreme Court in support of Broadnax’s appeal.

Theresa Butler, Matthew Butler’s mother, had asked that the execution proceed.

“This so called confession from cummings is just a stall tactic by Broadnax’s desperate defense team. Its all a lie,” Butler wrote in a post on social media.

Broadnax was the third person put to death this year in Texas and the 10th in the country. Texas has historically held more executions than any other state.

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