In 1998, a Harris County court was asked to overturn a young death row prisoner’s conviction, his attorney arguing the teen should never have been found competent to stand trial.
Tony Tyrone Dixon was 17 and living in a group home for intellectually disabled people when he killed Elizabeth Peavy in a 1994 carjacking. He was “incapable of saying a complete sentence,” let alone participating in his defense at trial, one of Dixon’s trial attorneys swore in an affidavit included in the legal filing.
For 24 years, Dixon waited in prison as his petition inexplicably went unresolved, lost in a system that churned through about 60,000 new felony cases last year.