'Breaks a little part of you every day': Texas man on Death Row

by Cecile Clocheret and Francois Picard

Steven Nelson has spent more than a dozen years on Death Row in Texas and is to be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday for the murder of a pastor that he insists he did not commit.

"It's hard at times," the 37-year-old Nelson said in an interview with AFP at the maximum-security prison in Livingston, a town 75 miles (120 kilometers) north of Houston, where he is awaiting his execution.

"You're waiting to be put to death," he said. "So that kind of breaks a little part of you every day... You just don't want to do nothing."

Nelson, who was wearing a white prison jumpsuit, spoke to AFP from a cubicle behind a glass partition and arrived for the interview in handcuffs, which were removed by prison guards and put back on when he departed.

Nelson was convicted of the 2011 murder of Clint Dobson, a 28-year-old pastor, during a robbery of the NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington, near Dallas.

Dobson was beaten and suffocated. Judy Elliott, the church secretary, was also badly beaten but survived.

Nelson's appeals against his conviction and death sentence have been repeatedly rejected by Texas courts and the US Supreme Court has declined to hear his case.

Nelson acknowledges that he served as a lookout during the robbery and that he entered the church after the murder to steal some items.

But he says it was his two accomplices, who were never brought to trial, who were the ones who committed the murder.

"I didn't know what was going on on the inside," he said, and his friends "blamed everything on me."

"So they're free and I'm locked up," he said. "I'm here on Death Row because of what somebody else did."

"I'm an innocent man," Nelson said. "I'm being executed for a crime, a murder, that I did not commit when all the DNA and legal proofs have proved that I didn't kill anybody."

- 'Pumped full of drugs' -

Nelson married a French woman, Helene Noa Dubois, while in prison who he said has had a "major impact" on his life.

"We started first as friends and as the years progressed the love and the feelings progressed more and we got married on December 4," he said.

"I've never had human contact with her, it's always been behind glass," he said.

"When someone can love you behind glass and not touch you, or see what your scent smells like, none of that, and still love you deeply, unconditionally, that is something wonderful."

Nelson said he is afraid to leave his wife alone and it is up to her to decide whether she wants to witness his execution.

"I really don't want her to see that, me getting pumped full of drugs and being overdosed with drugs to kill me, to make my heart stop," he said.

"I think that would leave a bad impression. That would override the good memories we've had over the years, to always close her eyes and see that," he said. "But if she makes that choice to be there then that's her choice."

- 'No human contact' -

Nelson has asked for his spiritual advisor, Jeff Hood, a death penalty opponent, to be in the execution chamber with him "to pray over me and give me last rites."

"That'll be the first human contact that I've had in 13 years," he said. "Because back here, we have no human contact with any other inmates."

Nelson said he has spent the past dozen years in an 8-by-10-foot (2.5-by-3-meter) cell for 22 to 24 hours a day. As his execution date approaches, he is now under constant video surveillance.

Death Row inmates protest executions at the prison by refusing to speak on a day that someone is being put to death.

"We don't speak, period, that whole day," Nelson said. "We don't talk to officers. We don't talk to each other.

"We're mostly in our thoughts, we're like praying, trying to have some form of connection with that person getting executed."

There were 25 executions in the United States last year.

The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others -- California, Oregon and Pennsylvania -- have moratoriums in place.

Three states -- Arizona, Ohio and Tennessee -- that had paused executions have recently announced plans to resume them.

President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and on his first day in the White House he called for an expansion of its use "for the vilest crimes."

© Agence France-Presse