Matthew Johnson’s guilt was never in question. On the stand during his 2013 trial, he admitted to the crime that landed him on death row. The attack—an early morning robbery and murder in a populous Dallas suburb—was also caught on camera.

Johnson is scheduled to be executed by the State of Texas on May 20, exactly 13 years to the day after he robbed a Fina Whip-In convenience store in Garland and set the store clerk on fire. Johnson was convicted of the murder of Nancy Harris, the 76-year-old clerk. During his trial and in his years on death row, he has expressed remorse for his crime. If the execution proceeds, Johnson will be the fourth person in the state put to death by lethal injection this year. There are currently no other executions scheduled by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice this year. 

The Texas Attorney General’s Office sought the execution date after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear arguments in the case last year. 

“To be sure, Ms. Harris’ murder was horrific, and it was committed by Matthew Johnson,” wrote his appeals attorneys in an application for clemency submitted to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles in April. “Mr. Johnson understands the harm he has caused and is deeply regretful.” 

Footage caught by the store’s surveillance cameras shows Johnson entering the store shortly after Harris gets in, around 7 a.m. on Sunday, May 20, 2012. He douses Harris with lighter fluid from a water bottle and demands money. As Harris complies, opening the cash register, Johnson steals cigarettes and lighters from an overhead area and wrenches Harris’ ring off of her right hand. After he takes the cash from the register, he flicks a lighter and Harris ignites. He leaves the store, pocketing candy bars on his way out. 

Two nearby Garland Police officers saw the flames and went to help Harris, who described her attacker. A firefighter and paramedic treated her on the scene, and she was transported to Parkland Memorial Hospital. She died five days later after infection set in. The grandmother of 12 was reportedly surrounded by family at the time. 

Johnson, who was arrested in a nearby neighborhood about an hour after the attack, did not deny his guilt during his trial in Dallas County 363rd District Court. He said he was drunk and high after drinking all night and smoking $100 worth of crack cocaine. He robbed the store, he said, to get money to buy more drugs, according to court records. 

His attorneys didn’t call any witnesses during the first phase of the trial, in which the jury is asked to determine guilt or innocence. Because the death penalty was on the table, the trial had a secondary phase. During this portion of the trial, his lawyers called Johnson’s family members, his former coworkers, and his wife to testify that Johnson was only violent because of drugs and try to convince the jury to opt for a life sentence over the death penalty. 

Johnson testified about his past, saying he experienced sexual abuse and began smoking marijuana as a child. A week before the attack, Johnson asked local police to arrest him because he needed help, but officers refused, according to his testimony. 

He said the day of the robbery, he didn’t intend to kill Harris. He testified that when he flicked the lighter that morning, he was trying to get her to back away. But, according to newspaper reports at the time, he told the jury he felt like “scum” and that he deserved the death sentence. 

After about a day of deliberation, the jury—made up of 11 women and one man—decided the mitigating evidence presented by the defense didn’t outweigh the facts of the crime, which they saw unfold on the security footage. They also said they believed Johnson would prove dangerous in the future based on testimony about his criminal record from the state. 

Subsequent appeals—including an attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case in 2023—were unsuccessful. His new attorneys have attempted to raise concerns about the Texas death penalty statute, which requires juries to decide whether someone poses a future danger to society, either inside or outside of prison. “Every person has a non-zero chance of being violent in the future,” his attorneys wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court. Johnson,court documents state, has not been violent since being placed on death row. (His attorneys did not respond to requests for comment for this story.) 

But courts have repeatedly decided that, even if juries get it wrong sometimes, there’s nothing unconstitutional about Texas’ “future dangerousness” condition. In Johnson’s case, the courts cited these past decisions, refusing to reconsider the matter.

Johnson’s lawyers again raised this issue in their clemency appeal to the state pardons board . They argue that Johnson’s record, in and out of prison, shows that he has “only been dangerous during periods of his life when he was abusing cocaine, which he does not use while in prison.” 

The clemency application sheds more light on Johnson’s background, detailing a childhood where he was “largely unsupervised” and began using drugs when he was just seven years old. As a middle schooler in the 1980s, Johnson started using crack cocaine, alongside his brothers and older cousins. In 2002, he spent less than two weeks at the Green Oaks Hospital in Dallas for treatment before his insurance ran out. 

Johnson spent five years in prison between 2004 and 2009 for robbery, and his attorneys say he was clean and sober inside and for two years after he was released. In 2011, Johnson relapsed after his wife lost her job shortly after they bought their first home. 

The Board of Pardons and Paroles has not yet decided on Johnson’s clemency application. The Board, who are gubernatorial appointees, very rarely recommends clemency. 

Johnson, like many on death row, participated in the faith-based program, which began in 2021, making Texas the first state to offer a program like it to condemned prisoners. Lawyers and advocates often make religious pleas for mercy ahead of executions—citing tenets of redemption, mercy, and forgiveness. But even in Texas, those arguments have rarely swayed decision makers. It’s not uncommon for people’s last words, spoken from the gurney before lethal drugs are injected, to be quotes from scriptures. 

The influence of the religious instruction is evident in the way Johnson talks about his pending date with death.

“This is the end, but for me it’s the beginning of life,” he wrote to the Texas Observer a week before his execution. “I truly love you, Mrs. Harris and I’m sorry. I pray we meet in eternity and dwell together forever.” 

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