Texas man set to be executed for killing a pastor in his own church

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.

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.

Texas death row inmate Steven Lawayne Nelson.Michael Graczyk / AP fileSouth 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.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-man-set-executed-killing-pastor-church-rcna190753

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