Texas to Execute Faith Leader Despite Victim Family Clemency Plea

The State of Texas plans to execute Will Speer in two days despite pleas from the victim’s sole living relative and dozens of faith leaders calling on the State to spare Mr. Speer’s life so that he may continue his powerful ministry and teaching.

“In my heart, I feel that he is not only remorseful for his actions but has been doing good works for others and has something left to offer the world,” Sammie Gail Martin, sister of victim Gary L. Dickerson, said in a clemency application filed last week before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. “I respectfully request that his sentence be changed to life in prison where hopefully he can continue to help others and make amends for his past crimes.”

Mr. Speer was selected as the first incarcerated faith-based coordinator for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Faith-Based Program in June, after he graduated with honors because he demonstrated “a commitment to change that is readily observable to … peers, the unit chaplain, and Field Ministers.”

Based “on the belief that individuals, no matter their past, can change,” the program involves 20 to 30 hours per week of study and community discussion to help participants “reach a point in their lives where they are truly repentant for their actions, seek forgiveness, and find inner peace with God,” TDCJ Chaplain Joaquin Gay told the Houston Chronicle.

Under Texas law, a jury cannot impose a death sentence unless it finds that the person will forever be a “future danger.” Will’s sentencing jury heard nothing about his childhood or the abuse he suffered in prison before it decided that, at 23 years old, Will was irredeemable. Finding he would always be dangerous, the jury sentenced Will Speer to death.

In solitary confinement on Texas’s death row 23 hours a day and denied access to rehabilitative programs, Mr. Speer told the Chronicle he felt hopeless. “I was looking around my cell and really coming to the realization of my poor choices and poor decisions and that I don’t have the answer,” he said. “And, because of that, I cried out to God. There wasn’t a voice—it wasn’t something like that. It was me making the decision to say that I don’t have the answers, but I know that God does.”

In 2021, Mr. Speer was selected for the Faith-Based Program, where he and 27 other men were allowed to study, pray, and sing together with support from chaplains, field ministers, and visits from the warden. Six months into the program, Mr. Speer experienced human contact for the first time in two decades when he was baptized. Today, Mr. Speer mentors and ministers to other men on death row, teaches classes, and mediates conflicts. His fellow prisoners report that he has prevented people from engaging in violence many times and have written that his work is greatly improving death row. Each morning, even as his execution date approaches, Mr. Speer delivers inspirational sermons over the prison’s radio station.

Mr. Speer’s attorneys submitted a clemency petition on October 6 asking the Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend that the governor commute his sentence to life imprisonment without parole, so that he can spend the rest of his life serving as a Field Minister “to help others by sharing his story of hardship, sin, repentance, and peacemaking.” Mr. Speer is an “instrument of change for other incarcerated men,” whose “witness of repentance and restitution would have a powerful effect on the men inside, bringing peace and hope to men who are often short of both,” said Chaplain’s Assistant Joseph Lee.

Dozens of faith leaders and others, including the victim’s sister, have called on the board to grant clemency. “All life is sacred, from our beginning through our natural death,” a group of evangelical leaders wrote in support of Mr. Speer, and a grant of clemency would “honor this Christian culture of life.”

To read more about Will Speer's path toward redemption through his prison ministry, read "Will Speer Found Hope on Texas' Death Row" from Texas Monthly Magazine.

To sign the Action Network petition addressed to Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole, visit "Stop the Execution of Will Speer" and add your name to those calling for clemency.