Texas carried out its sixth execution of 2026 on Wednesday evening, when Jamaal Howard, 46, received pentobarbital at the state prison in Huntsville and was pronounced dead at 8:03 p.m. Howard was convicted in the 2000 robbery and fatal shooting of Vickie Swartout, a 42-year-old convenience store clerk in Silsbee. In his final statement, he apologized to the victim’s family and asked for their forgiveness.

Howard’s attorneys fought to halt the execution, arguing he was intellectually disabled and raising concerns about the reliability of Texas’s execution drugs. Those concerns grew louder after Tennessee inmate Christa Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital on September 30. Both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop the execution, and Howard became the 30th person executed in the U.S. this year.

The case has renewed a national debate over capital punishment, how states determine intellectual disability, and whether execution protocols are dependable. Florida leads the country with 16 executions in 2026, while Texas is now at six. Where do you stand on the pace of executions and the questions raised by the Tennessee case? Let us know.