Texas | New Year, New Execution—Charles Thompson is scheduled to die on Jan. 28

Texas prison officials will attempt to execute their 1st death row inmate of 2026 next week. Charles Thompson, who was convicted of killing his former girlfriend, Glenda Dennise Hayslip, and her companion, Darren Cain, in April of 1998, is scheduled to die on Jan. 28. 

An attorney representing Thompson has not replied to questions from the Chronicle about the efforts he will make to try to save Thompson’s life. As of press time, no appeal on the inmate’s behalf has been filed with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. 

According to the Houston Press, the execution is the 1st one requested by new Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare, who came into office last year. The Press reports that Andrew Smith, chief of the office’s post-conviction writs division, said the D.A. is seeking Thompson’s death because “it’s been since 2021 since he exhausted all his appeals, and there’s zero question as to his culpability in this case.”

Kristin Houlé Cuellar of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty worries that Teare’s effort to have Thompson executed will have implications for the 63 other inmates on death row who were convicted in Harris County courts, who number more than a third of the nearly 170 people on death row in the state. As Cuellar has repeatedly noted over the years, Harris County, which includes the city of Houston, is ground zero for capital punishment in Texas and the world. It has been responsible for the executions of 135 of the 596 people killed in Texas in the modern era of the death penalty. 

However, like the other counties that seek capital punishment in Texas, Harris County has sent fewer people to death row in recent years. TCADP released its annual summary, Texas Death Penalty Developments in 2025: The Year in Review, last month. It reports that only three people were sentenced to death in Texas in 2025, down from a high of 48 in 1999. Harris County was responsible for two of the verdicts. Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, accounted for the other. 

TCADP’s report says that Texas prosecutors are deciding not to seek capital punishment because of its high expense for taxpayers and the incredibly long appeals process afforded to death penalty defendants. 

“Among the 9 cases for which prosecutors dropped plans to seek the death penalty are 2 significant examples that included agreement from victims’ survivors,” a press release regarding the report states. “The El Paso County District Attorney dropped the death penalty in exchange for a guilty plea by Patrick Crusius, who was already serving 90 federal life sentences for the racially-motivated mass shooting at a Walmart in 2019 that killed 23 people and wounded dozens more. … Prosecutors in San Jacinto County dropped the death penalty for Francisco Oropeza after estimating it would cost between $1.2 million and $2 million to try the case – four times their annual budget for indigent cases.” 

The state scheduled seven executions last year, TCADP’s report states. 2 men received stays from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals: David Wood, who has spent over 30 years on death row, and Robert Roberson, whose innocence claims are supported by Republican and Democratic lawmakers, scientists, and many concerned citizens. It was the 2nd time in 2 years that Roberson faced execution, despite new scientific and medical evidence that strongly suggests he is innocent. 

The TCADP report also notes that 5 death row inmates died in custody last year, the same amount as were executed. Most had spent decades on death row and faced multiple execution dates. Scott Panetti, the most glaring example of the justice system’s inability to humanely treat mentally ill individuals who commit murder, was 1 of the 5. He died in May after more than 30 years on death row. 

According to reporting in The Texas Tribune, Panetti believed that the state wanted him dead in order to stop his preaching of the gospel and his efforts to expose a conspiracy of pedophiles in Fredericksburg, where he had killed his wife’s parents in 1992. The state sought Panetti’s execution relentlessly, despite the clear and overwhelming evidence of his schizophrenia, which resulted in more than a dozen psychiatric hospitalizations. Panetti’s case led the Supreme Court in 2007 to establish a new standard for deciding who is competent to be executed. In 2023, a federal judge finally declared him too insane for execution. He spent his final years in a prison hospital.

Source: Austin Chronicle, Brant Bingamon, January 22, 2026

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde