James Garfield Broadnax is scheduled to die on April 30, 2026, by lethal injection.
Broadnax was sent to death row for robbing and killing Stephen Swan, 26, and Matthew Butler, 28, in the Dallas suburbs in 2008.
Broadnax, who is now 37, has spent nearly half of his life on death row at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, after being convicted of a 2008 double murder in Garland that his own co-defendant now swears he did not commit.
With weeks remaining before his execution date, a cascade of new evidence, including a sworn confession, DNA corroboration, allegations of racially rigged jury selection, and the use of rap lyrics to brand him a “monster.” (Hogtie ‘em and body bag ‘em / Send them to the mayor / Then I bombed the whole country / Send the press, the paper.”)
These developments have placed his case at the center of a renewed national conversation about race and the death penalty in America.
Add to that a wedding inside a death row facility. Just days after his legal team filed an emergency petition for a new trial, Broadnax was scheduled to marry his fiancée, Tiana Krasniqi, a UK-based lawyer who came to know him while researching American death penalty cases at the Allan Polunsky Unit.
“It was never the intention to be in a relationship with somebody on death row…Our wedding keeps being pushed. It’s not easy to get married to somebody in a Texas criminal justice system. But we’re hoping to get married. It has been a lot of working hard to ensure that James gets his justice really in a way in terms of obviously with the new discovery that’s incredible because I’ve always believed in James.”
Tiana Krasniq, James Broadnax’s fiancée
A cousin’s confession
The most recent development in the Broadnax case arrived on March 11, 2026. Demarius Cummings, Broadnax’s cousin and co-defendant, signed a sworn declaration under penalty of perjury admitting that he, not Broadnax, was the one who shot and killed Swan and Butler.
Broadnax had confessed to killing the men, detailing how he shot both men multiple times.
“It was my idea to rob Mr. Swan and Mr. Butler, and I obtained the pistol we took with us that evening and which was used to shoot the victims,” Cummings said in his confession. “Following the crime, James and I spoke about the story we would tell … I persuaded James to take the blame for shooting the two victims. Later, we both gave statements to the media. In James’s statements, he said that he had participated in the robberies and shot the two victims, while in my statements, I said that while I had participated in the robberies, James had shot the two victims. These statements were not accurate. In fact, I was the one who shot the two victims, not James.”
Cummings had maintained the opposite story for nearly 17 years through his own trial, Broadnax’s trial, and multiple meetings with Broadnax’s lead attorney, Steven Herzog.
It was only after he learned in February 2026 that his cousin was scheduled to be executed that Cummings broke.
His attorneys told the Defender that Cummings went through a spiritual evolution in prison and that his initial testimonies weighed heavily on him.
The confession is corroborated by DNA evidence that was present at Broadnax’s original trial but never fully explained. DNA from only Cummings, not Broadnax, was found on the grip of the murder weapon and in the pocket of one of the victims.
Broadnax’s DNA was absent from both.
The legal petition filed March 18 argues that neither the conviction nor the death sentence would have stood had the jury known the truth.
At trial, the only direct evidence linking Broadnax to the killings was a series of media interviews he gave, still “high on PCP and marijuana,” and on suicide watch, during which he repeatedly claimed to have “blanked out” and retained no memory of the events.
His lawyers argue that those statements were false, made to protect his cousin, and were inherently unreliable. Cummings, who was tried separately, received life without parole. The state did not seek the death penalty against him.
A nearly all-white jury
The exclusion of Black jurors from the panel also added another layer to the case, per Sheri Lynn Johnson, an expert on the interface of race and issues in criminal procedure, and the Assistant Director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project.
“The jury selection issue here is really extraordinary,” she told the Defender. “The names of the Black jurors and only the Black jurors were bolded. Reasons were given that did not explain the strikes. This is very strong evidence all by itself…But it’s important to notice why did they do that? The reason…is [they] wanted to use racially inflammatory information in order to sway a jury, information that would be less attractive to Black jurors.”
According to the Supreme Court case, Broadnax was convicted by an almost all-white jury after the state struck every eligible Black juror during jury selection. The trial judge added one Black juror back to avoid empaneling an all-white jury.
Documents subsequently disclosed by the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office revealed that prosecutors maintained a spreadsheet tracking every juror by race and sex.
“In addition, metadata associated with the electronic version of the spreadsheet confirmed that the spreadsheet had been created, used, modified, and printed by the State during jury selection,” the appeals read.
Handwritten notes on one Black juror’s questionnaire read: “Seems okay… hardworking, smart. Only concern . . . [Defendant]’s age + race w/ Juror’s son age + race, as mentioned.”
Newly released jury selection records from Cummings’ related trial, tried by the same team of Dallas County prosecutors just months later, showed an identical hand-annotated chart tracking each prospective juror’s race and gender. At Cummings’s trial, there was no Batson challenge or hearing, which is an objection raised during jury selection, arguing that the opposing party is using peremptory strikes to exclude potential jurors solely based on race, ethnicity, or sex.
Dr. Howard Henderson, Founding Director of the Center for Justice Research at Texas Southern University, said he observed clear evidence of race being central to the prosecution’s thinking about who should serve on the jury.
“Courts are supposed to ask to infer discriminatory intent from patterns of strikes and circumstantial clues. That’s what the research tells us,” Henderson said. “And here you have a nearly all-white jury right. This isn’t something that happens in the vacuum. You have a case where the court has already faulted Dallas County in earlier cases for a culture of discrimination and jury selection.”
Henderson added that the broader stakes could not be understated.
“What the evidence looks like to communities who have this long experience of racially skewed juries, and how some courts are willing to interpret it, goes to the heart of public confidence and capital punishment as a system that can fairly decide who lives and who dies,” he said.
Anthony Phillips, a professor in the Law department at Texas Southern University, said the legal framework itself requires scrutiny.
“Unfortunately, Batson v. Kentucky is so broad that it’s really easy for prosecution to justify their means for making their decisions… it challenges the 14th Amendment in the sense that it does not really provide protections of law as it was meant to be in the 14th Amendment for these types of cases,” he said. “What happens with Batson is, let’s say if I have this case and I highlight all the names, I can justify it to the court and say I was only highlighting these names because I wanted to make sure that I knew who the black jurors were, give them a fair opportunity to be selected if they met or passed.”
Rap lyrics on trial
During the sentencing phase of Broadnax’s trial, prosecutors read pages of rap lyrics he had written to the jury, arguing they were proof of his future dangerousness, a criterion required under Texas law to impose a death sentence. They called him “a new breed”, a “monster,” and “the worst kind of predator[s]” that “we like to watch” on “Animal Planet,” the type that “once he’s tasted the human blood, he ain’t going to be able to stop.”
The jury sentenced him to death that same day.
The use of those lyrics has drawn widespread condemnation from legal scholars and the broader music community. A number of prominent rap artists, including Travis Scott, Young Thug, and Killer Mike, are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to pause the death row execution next month. They filed amicus briefs at the court on Broadnax’s behalf.
“No matter how beautiful it sounds, or how horrific it may sound, it’s still just art,” Killer Mike said of Broadnax’s lyrics. “It’s an interpretation of the human spirit. It is not an admission of guilt.”
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has also joined in support of the Broadnax team’s jury selection claims.
“It would be a violation of the First Amendment because it’s freedom of expression,” Phillips said. “Someone cannot utilize lyrics in their artistic form to find someone guilty. Utilizing the First Amendment as a weapon is not acceptable in any case, especially in the case of the death penalty.
“They used the lyrics to shape whether or not his character would determine future culpability or opportunity for him to commit future crimes. It is not sufficient in any case to determine whether or not someone writing, rapping, or using rap lyrics is a future danger to society.”
Henderson framed it as a cultural and constitutional problem.
“Rap is a form of artistic expression that’s very often metaphorical, stylized, and rooted in a particular cultural tradition, treating those lyrics as a window into future dangerousness risks punishing a person not only for what they did, but for the kind of Black culture expression that he engages in,” he said. “In this capital case, where the question is literally a matter of life or death, blurring the line between protective speech and evidence of dangerousness is especially troubling.”
Criminal defense attorney Stanley Schneider of Schneider & McKinney in Texas connected the racial makeup of the jury directly to the use of rap lyrics.
“If you ever looked at the history of Hispanic music, from Mexico that celebrated the bandits, the outlaws, the drug dealers. There have been books written about that type of music, and they’re talking about society, not just about their own conduct,” Schneider said. “You shouldn’t be able to use music. Otherwise, Bob Marley and Eric Clapton could be prosecuted for assuming this error.”
A race against time
In the 17 years since his conviction, Broadnax’s legal team says he has become a different person. He reads, writes, plays chess, and was selected as a peer counselor for other inmates and as a mentor for at-risk youth through the Chris Young Foundation. He participates in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Faith-Based Program, available only to inmates considered the best candidates for rehabilitation, the team said.
His legal team has filed petitions in the Texas state court and the U.S. Supreme Court, and has sent a letter to Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot asking his office to join the effort to stay or vacate the execution.
