A quick listener note. This podcast contains adult language and descriptions of violence.

All over Texas. People are watching what's happening here in Huntsville, the killing capital of the country.

Huntsville, Texas, August 21st, 2019. It's hot and humid. The air is thick with the smell of guano.

The late afternoon sun is being chased west by dark clouds. There's a storm coming.

A group of protesters has gathered outside the imposing prison known as the walls.

We're minutes away from an execution. The fourth this year.

Tonight, the state of Texas will commit pre-mouticated murder of an innocent man.

We know that they don't have the evidence to prove he had anything to do with his murder.

And yet Texas, in its infinite ignorance, is going to kill another innocent person.

We've just come up from Houston, which is about an hour south.

We traveled there to begin reporting on an old death penalty case from 1992.

It involves a man named Charles Rabie, who was convicted and sent to death row for the murder of an elderly woman named Edna Franklin.

She was stabbed to death in her home on Houston's north side.

No physical evidence tied Charles to the crime.

But just days after Franklin was killed, he confessed to her murder.

Charles's case played out during a pivotal time in Houston's history.

The population was booming, and so was crime.

There were hundreds of homicides a year, and police were racing to close cases as fast as possible.

Meanwhile, the longstanding culture in the Harris County District Attorney's Office, which covers Houston,

was aggressively pro-death penalty.

Throughout the 90s, Harris County sent more people to death row than any other jurisdiction in the country.

A lot of people were condemned to die in cases that would never result in a death sentence today.

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