Curtis Riser had some concerns about the problem of wrongful convictions. He wasn’t the only potential juror to raise this point ahead of the 2009 capital murder trial of James Broadnax, in which the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office was seeking death, but attorneys for the state used one of their limited peremptory strikes to keep Riser off the jury. 

Prosecutors for the state have said they struck him from the jury pool because of his stated concerns, but their notes tell a different story. “Only concern … age + race,” an attorney for the state wrote on his jury questionnaire.

Aqwana Long said her feelings about capital punishment were mixed, but she clarified she meant it should only be applied in some cases. Rating her approval of the death penalty on a scale of one to 10, she chose seven. Still, the state rejected her. 

Dedric Morrison, who said he believed the death penalty was appropriate in “some murder cases,” seemed to prosecutors like he might be sympathetic to a defendant who was intoxicated at the time of the crime. This, according to the state, was enough to exclude him from the jury pool.

Riser, Long, and Morrison are all Black. They had similar answers and beliefs to potential jurors who were white, yet they were struck while their white counterparts were not. Attorneys built an all-white jury to try Broadnax, a Black teenager, until the trial judge defied protocol and reinstated one of the other previously struck Black jurors. The judge didn’t go so far as to imply that the prosecution was racially profiling, but stepped in after prosecutors had used almost half of their allowed challenges to cull all seven of the potential Black jurors from the pool. 

James Broadnax (Broadnax legal team)

In front of what ended up as a nearly all-white jury, prosecutors would argue that Broadnax and his cousin had robbed two white men—26-year-old Stephen Swan and 28-year-old Matthew Butler, both producers of Christian music—and that Broadnax had shot and killed the pair outside of a recording studio in Garland on June 19, 2008. 

Broadnax had confessed to shooting the men, and the jury returned a guilty verdict. One juror recently stated, “It seemed to be an open and shut case.”

During the punishment phase, where jurors in capital murder cases are asked to determine whether the defendant should get the death penalty or life in prison, prosecutors presented photos and spiral notebooks containing Broadnax’s handwritten rap lyrics. They included references to murder and robberies, and the prosecution held them up as yet another confession—and a sign that Broadnax was a dangerous man who would continue to pose a threat to society if allowed to live. The jury opted for death. 

Broadnax, 37, is scheduled to be executed by the State of Texas on April 30. His lawyers are still fighting to save his life, arguing things like the racial imbalance of the jury and prosecutors’ presentation of the rap lyrics constitute major problems with the trial and conviction. 

“The troubling aspects of the rap lyrics issue are magnified by the way that the jury selection was handled,” said Jim Marcus, a capital appeals expert with the University of Texas Capital Punishment Clinic, who has consulted on Broadnax’s case.

Then, last month, those longstanding issues were joined by another. Broadnax’s cousin, who is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for his role in the armed robbery, confessed that he was actually the shooter.

On June 19, 2008, a bicyclist on his way home from work at around 1 a.m. spotted two men lying on the ground outside of a recording studio. He reported what he saw to firefighters at a nearby station, who discovered the two men were dead from gunshot wounds.

Later that day, in Dallas, Broadnax and his cousin Demarius Cummings were telling people about a robbery they’d committed. When one of these people, a family friend, saw on the news that there had been a double murder, she made the connection and called the police, according to court documents. Officers pulled over Broadnax, who had driven a car belonging to one of the dead men to Texarkana. 

Broadnax was arrested and taken to jail in Dallas County, as was Cummings. There, they both told reporters that Broadnax had shot and killed the men.

The state opted to try the men separately. They would both face capital murder charges: Broadnax as the shooter and Cummings under the state’s Law of Parties, which can hold responsible anyone involved in a felony if it leads to murder. The state was seeking death for Broadnax, and life without parole for Cummings. Broadnax faced trial first.

At trial, the jury saw recordings of Broadnax confessing his involvement to reporters on TV. His lawyers contend he was high on PCP when he made these statements. But they were enough for the jury. 

There was some forensic evidence in the case, but it contradicted Broadnax’s story. On the gun and one of the victims’ bodies was Cummings’ DNA. But Broadnax’s wasn’t on the weapon or either of the victims, despite the fact that he allegedly pulled the trigger.

It would be nearly two decades before Cummings would explain the discrepancy: The reason the forensic evidence tied him to the gun and not Broadnax is because he was, in fact, the one who planned the robbery and shot the two men. 

On March 11, 2026, Cummings signed a written confession. He said he’d convinced his cousin to take the blame for the shooting, since Cummings had a significant criminal history, while Broadnax didn’t. The one blemish on the latter’s record was for marijuana possession. Cummings said he decided to come clean after he found out his cousin had an execution date.

“The fact that James received a death sentence for these crimes, while I was the one who shot the victims, has been weighing on my conscience, particularly as I have become more spiritual during my years in prison,” he wrote in the statement, which was first reported by the Dallas Morning News in March. 

Given the news, Broadnax’s lawyers once again asked the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) to consider the case. 

The victims’ mothers have come out in support of Broadnax’s execution moving forward, despite the new confession. Theresa Butler posted on social media that the new evidence was a “Hail Mary Pass” and wasn’t true. 

“Don’t believe that the latest fake confession, after 17 years, is going to change the cold blooded killer’s planned execution date,” she wrote.

The CCA, too, was unmoved. Earlier this month, the state’s top criminal court dismissed Broadnax’s application without reviewing the merits. 

But an open question remains. Prosecutors explicitly did not try Broadnax under Texas’s Law of Parties. The jury convicted him of being the actual killer, and it didn’t deliberate on whether he bore responsibility as a party to the crime. 

In situations like this, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a jury must determine a non-killer showed reckless indifference to human life in order to impose a death sentence. On April 20,, Broadnax’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to consider whether the jury’s lack of such a finding should halt Broadnax’s execution.

“Mr. Broadnax did not kill anyone, and no jury has determined whether he had the mental state this Court has determined is required to sentence a nontriggerman to death,” they wrote.  

James Broadnax was not a famous rapper when police picked him up in 2008, but his case has now caught the attention of some major artists. 

In March, major rappers including Travis Scott and Killer Mike filed briefs in support of Broadnax with the U.S. Supreme Court. They—along with more than three-dozen more artists, arts organizations, and scholars—took issue with the prosecution’s use of lyrics as evidence of a crime or a legally defined state of mind. 

In one brief, supporters wrote that hip-hop is “one of the most important forms of cultural expression in American history,” but still rap lyrics get mischaracterized in trial as “literal rather than metaphoric expressions,” as in Broadnax’s case.

Broadnax’s own attorneys wrote to the Supreme Court that using rap lyrics in criminal trials amplifies racial bias and transforms “artistic expression into a death warrant.” 

Genres of rap that feature aggressive lyrics, scholars say in one of the petitions, reflect young Black artists seeking a sense of control in an environment of economic hardship and police violence.

“The desire to project a sense of authority, even if fictional, helped explain the rise of gangsta and other subgenres of rap that featured violence and criminal behavior: they allowed young men of color to create a poetic world in which they were masters of their environments,” wrote the scholars. “Equally important, audiences understand rap music is—like gangster films, western movies, horror novels, or even pro wrestling—a type of entertainment.”

The Dallas prosecutors who brought forward Broadnax’s drafted lyrics were part of a larger trend. Rap lyrics have been used in hundreds of trials since the 1980s, according to research led by professors Erik Nielson and Andrea Dennis.

This has attracted a wave of dissenters: those who say rap lyrics should be prohibited from being used as evidence in court cases for various reasons, including risks of racial bias and threats to free expression. 

Young Thug is among the rappers who have had their lyrics used against them in court. (Shutterstock)

Broadnax’s legal team also took this issue to the Supreme Court. They asked the justices to consider whether, by presenting rap lyrics as evidence that a Black defendant is dangerous and violent, prosecutors violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

This issue has come up in Texas before. In 2024, the CCA ruled on the case of Larry Hart. Judges determined that a trial court should not have let prosecutors show jurors rap videos or bring up the defendant’s lyrics, saying it was prejudicial. 

At one point during Hart’s trial, while being questioned about his lyrics on the stand, he replied to the prosecutor, “It’s—it’s just a song, ma’am.”

Broadnax’s attorneys attempted to leverage this decision to get the Supreme Court to reconsider the use of rap lyrics in Broadnax’s case, but they were unsuccessful. 

As of April 22, there are still some doors open for Broadnax. Three petitions are pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, related respectively to his cousin’s confession, to the race-based jury selection, and again to the use of his lyrics. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles is also considering a clemency petition, which asks for Broadnax’s sentence to be commuted or for a 180-day reprieve from the threat of execution. 

Edith Clements, one of the jurors who sentenced Broadnax to death, wrote a letter to the parole board. In it, she said she wouldn’t have chosen the death penalty if she had known Cummings was the shooter. She writes that she has visited Broadnax on death row and apologized for her role in sealing his fate. Broadnax told her he wasn’t angry. “He is better not bitter,” she wrote.

The post A Looming Execution Raises Questions of Race, Responsibility, and Rap appeared first on The Texas Observer.

My grandmother sent me a photo last week. In it, a white candle burns inside a metal bucket.

Balanced on the bucket’s rim are the cast-iron grates from the gas stove—the stove that no longer has gas. And, on top of the grates, sits the coffee maker. The idea is that the candle’s small, dying flame will heat the stovetop espresso maker just enough for the coffee to brew. The whole contraption looks like something a child would build at a survival camp. My grandmother is over 80 years old, and she built it because in Cuba right now she has no gas to cook with, virtually no electricity at any hour of any day, and her morning coffee is non-negotiable.

I stared at that photo for a long time. I was sitting in my apartment in Houston. Outside the window, Texas was still Texas.

Cuba is in the dark. Literally—for most of the day, most of the country has no electricity. The national power grid, known by its Spanish acronym, SEN, has collapsed seven times in the past eighteen months. The last two collapses happened within a week. The government’s energy ministry admitted that 2025 was one of the nation’s worst years for fuel scarcity and promised that 2026 would be only “slightly better.”

My homeland generates roughly half the electricity its people need. The main thermal plant, Antonio Guiteras, breaks down constantly. Its boilers, designed to last only 25 years, are over four decades old and run only through faith and improvisation. More than a hundred diesel generators sit idle across the island for lack of fuel.

The result: In many provinces, people get about two hours of electricity a day. Sometimes none.

Houstonians know what it’s like to lose power. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri left millions of Texans without electricity for days in the dead of winter. In Cuba, such blackouts are common. The refrigerator shuts off. The food rots. The water pump cuts out. Bread goes unmade because the bakeries can’t run their ovens. People walk or bike kilometers to work because the buses lack fuel. They do laundry at three in the morning when the power sometimes flickers on without warning. They set their phones on windowsills to catch a signal, because even the cell towers fail. 

A friend in Havana recently wrote: “We’ve been without power for 48 hours and I can’t connect.” Another: “They gave us two hours of electricity. Not even enough time to breathe. The fridges didn’t cool down. The battery packs didn’t charge. This system is diabolical.” Another, commenting after a rare hour of power: “I woke up scrambling. Just in case the SEN goes down again.” This is the grammar of daily life in Cuba now—“just in case”—every sentence conjugated in contingency, every plan built on the assumption that everything could collapse before you finish thinking it through.

A few weeks ago, a fake government communiqué circulated on WhatsApp. It announced the imminent activation of “Option Zero” due to the country’s imminent total paralysis: no transportation, no electricity, no water, no food distribution, no internet. People were told to immediately fill every available container with water. To organize their block, their building, their neighborhood. That “revolutionary discipline and resolve” would be needed in the days ahead. Millions of people received it and thought, That sounds right.

The bogus notice was shared so many times that the government had to issue a denial in the newspapers. The fake communiqué was indistinguishable from reality because reality resembles apocalyptic fiction.

The United States—the country that gave me refuge and where I pay taxes—has spent several months now making it nearly impossible for Cuba to import petroleum.

One friend, a 33-year-old who has never left Cuba, sent me a voice message from Havana. He was eating a pizza at one of the rare street cafes that still runs on its own generator.

He told me that when Cubans talk about wanting freedom, they’re not really thinking about who specifically governs them. They’re thinking about survival. “What we want is food. What we want is opportunity. What we want is an economy, a salary, openness, prosperity. After that, we can think about other things,” he told me. Then he laughed a little. “The Cuban has never been about the future. The Cuban lives in the present. Give it to me now, I’ll enjoy it, and we’ll see.” 

I left Cuba in 2022. Before that, state security had detained me many times for doing journalism. The first time, in 2018, I was covering hurricane damage in the province of Pinar del Río when two officers on motorcycles stopped me and my photographer, confiscated our phones, held us for 12 hours, and asked—over and over—what we were doing there, who was funding us, what kind of organization was “independent.”

An “independent journalist,” for them, was synonymous with a counterrevolutionary. In Cuba, everything that cannot be directly controlled by the government—including the press—is prohibited.

Another time, in 2019, they held me for seven hours at a police station in the province of Holguín, where I had traveled to cover the closure of a sugar mill. They erased the files from my laptop and camera and made me sign a warning letter. A lieutenant colonel told me: “Here, I am the law.” On my way out, an officer mentioned my son. He suggested I dedicate myself to him. My son was 5. 

I did not want to leave Cuba. I loved my life there—my routine, my streets, my language, and even the specific weight of the air in August. I left because the alternative was to stop being a journalist, become a journalist who writes only what they’re told, or end up in prison. I left because staying required either submission or suffering, and I’d already had enough of both.

I left my son behind. He is now 12 years old. He lives in Havana with his mother and, like everyone in Havana, has two hours of electricity a day or less. The image I can’t get out of my head is his face in the dark, lit only by the phone screen. A 12-year-old illuminated by that small rectangle because there is no other light. He rations the phone’s battery because he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to charge it again. I send money when I can. Life in Houston is not cheap, and I am a freelance journalist who also drives Uber and does odd jobs. I know the money I send doesn’t really fix anything.

Nearly all of Cuba’s power plants run on fuel that the island cannot buy because the United States—the country that gave me refuge and where I pay taxes—has spent several months now making it nearly impossible for Cuba to import petroleum.

People spend the night in the dark on the Malecón during a blackout in Havana on March 21. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

The Cuban government has been blaming the United States for its problems since 1959—sometimes rightly, sometimes not. At this point I am no longer interested in that argument. My only position on the Trump administration’s oil blockade comes from seeing a 12-year-old rationing his phone battery and a grandmother heating coffee with a candle. I care about the suffering of the people there, even as a Cuban forced to come to the United States for protection. And now the country that gave me that protection is tightening the screws on the place where my relatives live in the dark.

The coffee contraption my grandmother built—the candle, the metal bucket, the cast-iron grates, the espresso maker balanced on top—is the most Cuban thing I have ever seen. It is ingenious. It is absurd. And it is dignified—because dignity in Cuba has always been a form of resistance built from whatever materials desperate people can find. 

She makes  coffee every morning. The candle is small. It takes longer than it should. The coffee, I’m told, comes out fine.

The post Making Coffee with a Candle—and Other Notes from a Cuba Gone Dark appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Victoria Hernandez, 23, was brought into work at the Blanco Road San Antonio Starbucks location in August 2025. 

She’d begun working for the company at 17, while still in high school, dutifully weathering the often thankless rush of caffeine-seeking customers for just $10 an hour—even throughout COVID. Soon, Hernandez was helping the $115-billion company open up new stores and train employees. 

Since December 2021, Starbucks workers began unionizing nationwide—demanding an end to understaffing, pay raises, and an end to union-busting practices—but the stores she worked at hadn’t joined in the organizing wave. Using common union-busting tactics, managers had told her that union workers would get less benefits and were “just trying to stir up trouble.” She said management thought she could help tamp down organizing at the Blanco Road location.

Things didn’t go that way. Less than three months later, in mid-November, Hernandez was leading her coworkers in a strike at the store as part of a national “Red Cup Rebellion” after negotiations between Starbucks Workers United and the company broke down. 

“I made connections with my other coworkers … and it made me realize this is actually empowering and unifies us,” Hernandez said. “I was very excited for the opportunity to show that you can exercise your right and it should be normal to organize your workplace and show your strength as a worker.”

In Texas, workers at 29 Starbucks stores have unionized since June 2022. Nationally, that figure stands at 582, out of nearly 17,000 nationwide, according to a spokesperson at Starbucks Workers United. It’s the fastest-growing union campaign in modern history, part of an organizing wave that’s recently halted organized labor’s statistical decline nationwide and even, in Texas, reversed the downward trend. But forming a union is just the first step in using federal labor law to improve working conditions, and the next step—collective bargaining—has proceeded at a glacial pace as the company stonewalls workers. Nearly five years in, a first contract is still nowhere in sight, though the corporation did agree in 2024 to work on a framework that would cover all union stores and negotiations did resume earlier this month.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, a senior lecturer emeritus at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, told the Texas Observer that Starbucks’ practice of dragging out negotiations is a common tactic deployed by employer-side law firms such as Littler Mendelson, which represents Starbucks. She added that getting an employer to follow the law and bargain in good faith is often a prolonged legal process, but to “get Starbucks to settle a contract, the union has to really organize as many of the stores as possible and build allies with other unions, and make it so the cost of not recognizing the union is greater than the cost of bargaining.” 

At the Blanco Road location, the Starbucks store was shut down for two months from November to December 2025. Hernandez had organized all 14 workers to participate in the strike. “It was very powerful for them to see that the store can’t run without us,” Hernandez said. 

Hernandez and her coworkers picketed everyday of the week from 7 a.m. to noon. When they weren’t protesting in front of the store, they hosted community events to raise money and awareness. “I cannot say enough how much people were willing to come out and support,” Hernandez said. 

Trey Runyan, who for three years has been working at the first unionized Starbucks in Texas on North Lamar and 45th Street in Austin, is a member of the nationwide bargaining committee. 

Unlike other unions with a traditional top-down structure, where paid union staff members bargain for workers, Starbucks Workers United ensures that baristas are at the forefront of the decision-making process. His shop’s coworkers voted for Runyan to represent their store. As a delegate, he attends monthly Zoom meetings with more than 200 delegates. Any agreement with Starbucks has to go through the delegates. 

“These are a lot of people that are all fighting the same battle,” Runyan said. “It’s just been so humbling and just so profoundly amazing to be a part of a group of people that really want to care about each other.” 

The union’s current demands include that there be at least three baristas on the floor at all times, that wages start at $17 per hour with a four-percent annual increase, that health and safety precautions be improved, protections against discrimination be strengthened, and union-busting practices end, among other demands. 

In September 2024, seven months after the company agreed to work on a general framework for contracts, Brian Niccol took over the company. Workers say Starbucks backtracked on its promises and increased union-busting activities. Niccol instituted the “Back to Starbucks” campaign to enhance customer service and decrease wait-time for orders, but workers the Observer spoke to said that just intensified their already heavy workload.

In September 2025, The Guardian reported Niccol received $97.8 million in total compensation the prior year—6,666 times more than the median annual salary of a Starbucks worker, $14,674, making it the biggest CEO-to-worker pay gap among the top 500 corporations in the United States. The outlet also reported the company paid $3.8 billion to shareholders in the 2024 fiscal year through stock buybacks and dividends. 

Runyan makes a little more than $17 an hour at the Austin store, but like most other Starbucks workers, he works less than 40 hours a week. This means he takes home only $2,000 a month. Over half of that goes to rent, $200 for groceries, and very little for savings. Runyan totaled his car in an accident recently, but he can’t afford a new vehicle on his wages. 

In Texas, the Dallas-Fort Worth metro has the greatest portion of unionized Starbucks stores. Fourteen of the 29 Texas Starbucks union shops are in the Metroplex area. 

Ben Estrello, a 24 year-old Starbucks barista, said the organizing there started with University of North Texas college students working at a Denton location and rapidly expanded from there, including to where he works at the Preston Royal shop in Dallas. 

Estrello told the Observer that before he started working at Starbucks, he delivered pizzas and worked at IHOP. “I’ve been doing food service for a while and was looking for something that had a little bit more community,” Estrello said. 

But he was disappointed to find out the company was not as progressive as he had heard, having admired its reputation for supporting the LGBTQ+ community and the environment. Working under Niccol’s policies, he found baristas were forced to write Charlie Kirk’s name on customers’ cups when they requested and subject to a new strict dress code. In the weeks leading up to the union election at Estrello’s shop, Starbucks executives constantly visited the store and held “captive-audience” meetings to dissuade workers from unionizing. 

“We saw people that we had never seen before in our store almost on a daily basis: higher-ups coming in and asking to sit down and talk with us, sometimes for hours while you were supposed to be working,” Estrello said. One time, Starbucks executives shut down the store for the night and took all the employees bowling. “It had the opposite effect,” Estrello said. “If the company is doing this much to try and get you to stop doing something, it’s going to give you a modicum of power.” 

Starbucks did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment. 

“Texas Starbucks workers have inspired workers around the state and around the country to fight for better jobs and a fairer economy,” U.S. Representative Greg Casar, an Austin Democrat whose current district stretches into San Antonio, told the Observer. “When Texas workers stand up for themselves, they stand up for the right of all of us to live in a country that works for everyone, not just the rich and powerful.” 

Despite the company’s tactics, in September 2025, Estrello and his coworkers won their union election. Two months later, they were swept into that national strike with hundreds of Starbucks workers from around the country. “We have great ambitions here,” Estrello said of organizing other Starbucks workers in the greater Dallas area. 

While most other Starbucks workers around the country returned to work in December, Estrello and his coworkers remained on strike for 102 days until February 25 this year. (His store was kept running in the meantime using non-union workers from other locations.) During the entire time, they’ve been forging networks with baristas from other Starbucks stores, hitting non-union stores during their off-hours to guide workers there through the unionization process. 

“We have an in everywhere,” Estrello said. “It’s not hard to talk to other people that do the same thing that you do on a daily basis, and oftentimes they have the same grievances that you do. They don’t necessarily know what the alternative is to putting up with those grievances, and if you let them know, they’re more likely to join you.” 

Estrello calls other Starbucks workers his “second family” and said their organizing has “given me a great amount of purpose.” 

Like Estrello, Hernandez—the worker at San Antonio’s Blanco Road location—told the Observer her life has changed since organizing with other Starbucks workers.

“It’s taught me the amount of strength that I have and all the things that I can do,” Hernandez said. “It showed me how far you can go, and how much power you have as a worker.” 

The post As Contract Negotiations Drag On, Texas Starbucks Workers Have Learned the Power of Organizing appeared first on The Texas Observer.