A Texas man convicted of beating and suffocating a Dallas area pastor in his own church during a robbery was facing execution on Wednesday, the second scheduled execution in the U.S. so far this year.
Steven Lawayne Nelson was condemned for the 2011 killing of Rev. Clint Dobson, 28, who was beaten, strangled and suffocated with a plastic bag inside NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington. Dobson’s secretary also was severely beaten and left for dead, but she survived.
Nelson, 37, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. Nelson would be the first Texas death row inmate executed since Robert Roberson’s Oct. 17, 2024, execution date was delayed in what would have been the first in the U.S. tied to a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, and the first of four scheduled in Texas over the next three months.
South Carolina carried out the nation’s first execution of 2025 on Friday. Marion Bowman Jr. was convicted of murder in the shooting death of a friend whose burned body was found in the trunk of a car in 2001.
Nelson was a laborer and high school dropout with a long history of legal trouble and arrests that started as early as age 6. Nelson recently married while on death row and has pleaded for mercy, claiming that he had only served as a robbery lookout and blamed two other men for killing Dobson.
Nelson testified at trial and has maintained that he waited outside the church for about 25 minutes before going in and seeing that Dobson and Judy Elliott had been beaten, and he insisted Dobson was still alive. Nelson said he took Dobson’s laptop and that one of the other men gave him Elliott’s car keys and credit cards.
The victims were later found by Elliott’s husband, the church’s part-time music minister, who didn’t immediately recognize her because she had been so severely beaten.
Trial evidence showed Nelson’s fingerprints and pieces of his broken belt at the crime scene, drops of the victims’ blood on his sneakers, and surveillance video showing him driving Elliott’s car and using her credit cards. Investigators also said the two men Nelson blamed for the attack had alibis: Phone records placed one of them 30 miles (48 kilometers) away, and phone records and a sign-in sheet placed the other man in a chemistry class.
Nelson’s attorneys appealed on claims of bad legal representation at his trial and sentencing, saying this lawyers did little to challenge the alibis of the other men, or present mitigating evidence of a troubled childhood in Oklahoma and Texas. His appeals have been denied by state and federal courts, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied a stay of execution on Jan. 28. Nelson’s attorneys this week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and halt his execution, to give them more time to challenge his conviction.
While awaiting trial, Nelson was indicted in the killing of another jail inmate. He was never tried on that charge after his guilty verdict and death sentence. During his trial, Nelson broke an electronic shock cuff off his ankle, and later broke a water pipe in a holding cell, flooding the courtroom with foul black water. He also regularly unshackled his handcuffs and ankle restraints by using a key he was hiding in his genitals.
Texas has three more executions scheduled before the end of April.
The first is scheduled for Feb. 13. Richard Lee Tabler was condemned for gunning down a strip club manager and the manager’s friend on Thanksgiving weekend in 2004. Tabler also acknowledged killing two dancers from the club. He was charged with their slayings but was never tried.