Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has commuted the death sentence of a man who masterminded the murder of his mother and brother after the inmate’s father, who barely survived the crime, pleaded for his killer son’s life to be spared.
Abbott’s decision, announced just a half-hour before Thomas “Bart” Whitaker was set to receive a lethal injection, is only the third time in four decades that a Texas governor has granted clemency to a death-row inmate on humanitarian ground.
