Steven Lawayne Nelson Arrested; – A man from Texas, convicted of assaulting and suffocating a pastor in the Dallas area during a robbery, was scheduled for execution by lethal injection on Wednesday evening. This marked the second execution in the United States for the year.
Steven Lawayne Nelson was set to be executed at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the murder of Rev. Clint Dobson in 2011. The 28-year-old pastor was brutally beaten, strangled, and suffocated with a plastic bag inside NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington, while his secretary endured severe injuries but survived the attack.
Approximately three hours prior to the scheduled execution, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Nelson’s last-minute appeals in a succinct one-paragraph ruling. Should the execution proceed, Nelson would become the first inmate on Texas’s death row to be executed since the postponement of Robert Roberson’s execution date on October 17, 2024, which would have been the first in the U.S. related to a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.
This execution is also the first of four planned in Texas over the upcoming three months. On Friday, South Carolina conducted the nation’s first execution of 2025, administering lethal injection to Marion Bowman Jr. for his conviction in the 2001 murder of a friend, whose charred remains were discovered in a car trunk.
Nelson, a laborer and high school dropout, has a lengthy history of legal issues and arrests dating back to the age of six. While on death row, he recently married and has appealed for clemency, asserting that he was merely a lookout during the robbery and attributing the murder of Dobson to two other individuals.
During his trial, Nelson testified that he waited outside the church for approximately 25 minutes before entering and discovering that both Dobson and Judy Elliott had been assaulted, maintaining that Dobson was still alive at that time. He claimed to have taken Dobson’s laptop and received Elliott’s car keys and credit cards from one of the accomplices.
The victims were ultimately discovered by Elliott’s husband, who served as the church’s part-time music minister and initially failed to recognize her due to the severity of her injuries.
