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What happens next after Tanner Horner death sentence? · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So when a judge bangs a gavel and you know,
• 0:03
  sentences a man to death, movies tell us that the story.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Is over right totally. The credits roll exactly.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the jury reads the verdict, the gavel comes down,
• 0:11
  the music swells, and the screen just.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: Fades to black like it's a neat little package.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but the reality, I mean that gavel is really
• 0:20
  just a starter pistol.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, it's just the beginning for the next ten.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: To fifteen, sometimes thirty years. The convicted person is going
• 0:27
  to sit in this basically a bathroom size concrete box.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a tiny box, all.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: While this completely labyrinthine legal machine spends millions of taxpayer
• 0:39
  dollars trying to decide if their brain is well too
• 0:43
  broken to execute.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: It completely shatters our cultural expectation of finality, doesn't it.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: It really does.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: I mean we crave resolution. You as a listener, as
• 0:51
  a human being, you want the credits to roll, especially
• 0:54
  when the crime is just so horrific it defies comprehension, right,
• 0:57
  But when you step into the actual world of cap
• 1:00
  punishment and appellet law, you start to realize this system
• 1:03
  isn't built for closure at all.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: No, not even a little bit.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: It is built for this methodical, agonizing and often just
• 1:10
  really paradoxical pursuit of absolute procedural perfection.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: And well, that pursuit of perfection is exactly what we
• 1:18
  are unpacking today.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: It's a massive topic.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Welcome everyone to another deep dive. And today we're looking
• 1:24
  at a massive collision. I'm talking about the devastating intersection
• 1:28
  between severe mental health claims and unthinkable criminal act and
• 1:33
  a justice system that prioritizes this grinding finality over swift retribution.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: It's heavy, but so important to understand, Yeah.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: And to really understand how this machine actually works for you,
• 1:44
  the listener, we have to look at it through the
• 1:46
  lens of one specific, incredibly tragic case.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: We're talking about the twenty twenty two murder of seven
• 1:51
  year old Athena Strand right.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: And the May twenty twenty six death ends of her killer,
• 1:56
  Tanner Horner. We've got court records, trial testimonies, victim statements.
• 2:00
  We're bringing it all to the table.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: Because it's a case that forces us to examine the
• 2:04
  very foundations of culpability. Really how so well, like, how
• 2:08
  does a society actually define evil versus say, a biological impairment.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: That's a huge question.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: It is, and how do victims' families process their grief
• 2:17
  when the state essentially demands that they participate in this
• 2:20
  decade's long procedural.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Loop, which is just brutal.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: So we are dissecting the entire apparatus of the Texas
• 2:26
  death penalty today, moving from the literal moment the crime occurred,
• 2:31
  all the way to the decades of a pellet purgatory
• 2:34
  that follow.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, So to understand the legal labyrinth we are heading into,
• 2:38
  we really have to start.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: With the catalyst, right, the crime itself.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: And what makes this catalyst so terrifying is the juxtaposition
• 2:45
  of the incredibly mundane and the absolutely unthinkable.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: It's chilling.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: Let's set the scene for you. It is November thirty,
• 2:53
  twenty twenty two. We are in rural Paradise.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: Texas, a very normal Wednesday evening exactly.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Athena Strand is seven years old. She's vibrant, she's spirited,
• 3:03
  a child her family described as their light. Yeah, it's
• 3:06
  around five three in the evening and she's playing outside
• 3:08
  her house. She's wearing these blue jeans with embroider flowers,
• 3:11
  a gray long sleeved shirt and like brown boots.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: You know, that level of detail, the embroidered flowers on
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  the jeans. It grounds the event so firmly in a
• 3:20
  reality we all recognize.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: It really does.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's an evening that feels universally familiar to anyone.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Exactly, any parent listening knows that exact outfit and the
• 3:30
  context of that evening is utterly normal.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: She'd had a minor argument with her stepmother the night before.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just the routine, spirited rebellion of a seven year old,
• 3:40
  pure mundane normality. And then a delivery van.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: Pulls up, a FedEx fan, specifically driven by thirty one
• 3:48
  year old Tanner Horner. He was a contract driver, right, yeah,
• 3:51
  working as a third party contractor. He's dropping off a
• 3:53
  package at the Strand home, which tragically was likely a
• 3:57
  Christmas gift.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: I think they said, possibly a set of party dolls.
• 4:01
  I really want to pause on this for a second,
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  because it fundamentally alters how we perceive a threat.
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  Speaker 2: Oh totally.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: We talk a lot about stranger danger with our kids,
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  you know, like don't talk to someone lurking in an alley,
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  don't get into an.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: Unmarked car, the standard warnings.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: But this is what I call the trojan horse of
• 4:18
  modern convenience.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: That is a really good way to put it.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: Because we have inherently been conditioned to trust uniform delivery drivers.
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  They walk right up to our front doors, past our fences,
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  our dogs, our security cameras, and we just we don't
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  even blink.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: We literally expect them. We track them on our phones.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Yes, they are part of the domestic ecosystem now. So
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  the betrayal of that specific condition trust is uniquely terrifying
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  because it just bypasses all our standard threat detection systems.
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  Speaker 2: That's a crucial psychological insight right there. It completely bypasses
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  the amygdala's alarm bells. I mean, he wasn't some shadowy
• 4:54
  figure creeping around. He was performing an expected, normal service.
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  Speaker 1: We have surveillance footage, right we do.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: Surveillance footage captures him interacting with Athena, But instead of
• 5:03
  just leaving the package and driving away, he abducts.
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  Speaker 1: Her, just unthinkably brazen.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: He physically lifts this small girl into the back of
• 5:11
  his delivery van and from there the reality of the
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  crime is captured in a way that is profoundly disturbing.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Largely because of the technology inherent in modern delivery vehicles.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: Yes, the interior camera.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: In the van, and it was recording audio too.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: It was, And it's the stark contrast in that audio
• 5:30
  that makes it so chilling. The van's radio is playing holiday.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: Music, specifically jingle bell rock, Yeah, and over.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: This incredibly cheerful, festive, culturally ingrained music of safety and joy.
• 5:42
  Horner leans in and says, don't scream or I'll.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Hurt you, and he repeats it twice.
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  Speaker 2: He does. We also hear Athena's reaction, which reveals just
• 5:51
  an agonizing level of awareness on her part.
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  Speaker 1: She knew what was happening.
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  Speaker 2: She is terrified, but she is highly cognitive. She asks
• 5:58
  what are you doing and then follows it up with
• 6:01
  the question that shows she understands exactly the peril.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: She is in. She asks, are you a kidnapper?
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: Right?
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  Speaker 1: And his reply to that seven year old is you're
• 6:10
  really pretty.
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  Speaker 2: Which is a calculated, deeply sinister response.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: It's something turning.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: Psychologically when a perpetrator responds to a child's direct question
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  about safety with an unsolicited comment on their physical appearance.
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  It is the immediate establishment of objectification and dominant I
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  admit exactly it tells us this wasn't some kind of
• 6:28
  panic response or accident. It establishes predatory intent. Immediately the
• 6:33
  van stops, Athena is crying, begging to go home, and
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  over the holiday music, her screams are recorded as he
• 6:39
  orders her to undress. God.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: This audio is devastating, but from a mechanical legal standpoint,
• 6:47
  it is the lynchpin of the entire case, isn't it?
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: It absolutely is because of what it shatters.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Right, his initial story, because when Horner was first questioned
• 6:55
  by investigators, he deployed this whole series of false narratives.
• 6:59
  His primary lie was that he had accidentally backed his
• 7:02
  van over her, panicked, and then kills her to cover
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  up the accident.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: Which I should note is a highly common defense mechanism
• 7:09
  in forensic psychology.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Oh really yeah.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: Perpetrators will very often attempt to minimize their culpability by
• 7:16
  framing the inciting incident as a tragic accident rather than
• 7:20
  a deliberate predatory action.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: So they want to seem like a victim of circumstance.
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  Speaker 2: Basically, it's an attempt to hold onto some shred of
• 7:27
  moral standing, like I'm not a monster who hunts children.
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  I'm just a guy who made a terrible mistake and panicked.
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  Speaker 1: But the prosecution used that interior van audio to completely
• 7:37
  obliterate that narrative.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: They had to.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, the audio unequivocally proves she was alive, she
• 7:43
  was uninjured, and she was communicative when she was forced
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  into the van exactly.
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  Speaker 2: The aftermath was a rapid cascade from there.
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  Speaker 1: Horner gives these shifting confessions, and then two days later,
• 7:54
  on December two, he actually leads authorities to her body.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, she had been dumped in a about nine miles
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  from her home, and.
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  Speaker 1: The forensic evidence was just irrefutable. She suffered blunt force
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  injuries and was strangled to death.
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  Speaker 2: And they found DNA evidence too, right, DNA in her underwear,
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  linking him directly to the sexual assault. He was arrested
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  that same day. And when you look at the digital
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  evidence from the van, the DNA, his own eventual confession
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  leading to the body, it's.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: A mountain of evidence.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: This sheer weight of it is staggering. It left absolutely
• 8:26
  no room for ambiguity about the mechanics of the crime
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  or the identity of the perpetrator.
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  Speaker 1: And that overwhelming, indisputable nature of this evidence is exactly
• 8:36
  what forced a stunning legal pivot in the courtroom three
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  and a half years later.
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  Speaker 2: It really shifted the entire focus of the trial because
• 8:43
  it takes us.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: From the fundamental question of any criminal trial, which is,
• 8:47
  you know, did he do it? To a much more complicated,
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  philosophically messy question.
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  Speaker 2: Why did he do it? And what does he actually
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  deserve exactly?
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  Speaker 1: Which brings us to part two of this deep dive.
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  The April seven, twenty twenty.
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  Speaker 2: Six the first stay of trial in Terren County, and.
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  Speaker 1: The defense made a highly specific strategic legal move right
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  out of the gate. Horner pleaded guilty to capital murder
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  and aggravated kidnapping on day one.
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  Speaker 2: Now, from the outside, pleading guilty to a capital offense
• 9:19
  sounds like giving up, right.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, why would defense attorneys do that? Doesn't
• 9:23
  that just hand the prosecutional win?
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  Speaker 2: It's actually a calculated risk regarding jury psychology. Oh interesting,
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  when the evidence of guilt is insurmountable, like audio recordings
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  of the abduction and solid DNA, forcing a jury to
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  sit through two weeks of a guilt Tennyson's phase is
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  incredibly damaging.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: Because they have to see all the awful stuff.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: Right, prosecutors would meticulously parade horrific crime scene photos, corner reports,
• 9:46
  agonizing details day after day.
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  Speaker 1: It would alienates the jury deeply.
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  Speaker 2: By the time they reached the sentencing phase, the jury's
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  well of empathy is entirely dry. They are furious that
• 9:58
  makes total sense. Please meeting guilty. The defense legally removes
• 10:02
  the guilt phase altogether. They concede the facts of a
• 10:06
  horror up front.
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  Speaker 1: And this thrusts the jury directly into a sixteen day
• 10:10
  penalty phase.
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  Speaker 2: Exactly so, the entire trial becomes a concentrated sixteen day
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  debate over one binary choice.
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  Speaker 1: Life without parole versus the death penalty.
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: Yes, the defense's singular mission shifts from denying the act
• 10:24
  to building what we call a mitigation narrative right Mitigation.
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  Mitigation is the legal concept of providing context that reduces
• 10:30
  the moral culpability of the defendant. They need to explain
• 10:33
  the mechanisms of his mind to show why his life
• 10:35
  should be spared despite the objective horror of his actions.
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  Speaker 1: And they built this narrative by really pulling back the
• 10:41
  curtain on his life.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: They brought in everyone.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they called his mother, his teachers, a speech pathologist.
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  They painted a picture of a severely chaotic childhood.
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: Severe bullying, profound social rejection.
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  Speaker 1: A mother struggling with addiction, a heavy reliance on his
• 10:55
  grandmother for basic stability. They noted he had extreme anger
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  issues growing.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: Up, but they also pointed out he eventually got his
• 11:02
  high school diploma, held down jobs, and had no prior
• 11:06
  criminal record or gang affiliations.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: But the true core of the defense's strategy rested on
• 11:11
  complex medical and psychological testimony.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: Light did. They brought in forensic experts, including a child
• 11:16
  development specialist named doctor Jolie Brahms, and.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: She testified about a massive slate of diagnoses. I mean
• 11:23
  the list is extensive, Oh, very extensive. We're talking autism
• 11:27
  spectrum disorder ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, possible fetal alcohol specialm
• 11:32
  disorder or FASD, and crucially, neurodevelopmental abnormalities in his frontal
• 11:38
  and temporal lobes.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this hardware versus software analogy, because I
• 11:42
  think it's the only way to really make sense of
• 11:43
  what the defense is trying to do here.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love this analogy. Let's break it down for
• 11:47
  the listener. Are the defense attorneys essentially arguing that his
• 11:50
  brain hardware, like the physical frontal lobes, the neural pathways
• 11:55
  shaped by fetal alcohol syndrome, is fundamentally biologically broken. Yes,
• 12:00
  and because the hardware is broken, we can't legally or
• 12:04
  morally blame his software, his personality, his choices for the
• 12:09
  violent output.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: That is precisely the argument, and it delves into the
• 12:12
  deeply controversial realm of biological determinism in the courtroom.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: Which is a huge philosophical debate.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: It is, let's look at the actual mechanisms. The frontal
• 12:20
  lobe of the human brain is responsible for executive.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Function, so impulse control exactly.
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  Speaker 2: It controls impulse regulation, empathy, social processing, and the ability
• 12:30
  to foresee long term consequences of an action.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: And how does the FASD tie into that well.
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  Speaker 2: Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, for example, can literally alter the
• 12:39
  physical structure of the brain during gestation. It causes permanent
• 12:42
  deficits in these exact areas. Wow, and then autism spectrum
• 12:46
  disorder affects how the brain processes social cues and sensory information.
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  Speaker 1: So the defense is telling the jury like, Hey, this
• 12:52
  isn't just a bad guy who made an evil choice.
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  This is a person who is navigating reality with a
• 12:58
  biological instrument that is catas strophically miscalibrated.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: Yes, Doctor Brahms testified that these severe impairments basically set
• 13:06
  the stage for his life. She described a mind that
• 13:09
  found the world overwhelming and unpredictable.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: Lanking the neurological tools to regulate intense emotional.
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  Speaker 2: States exactly now. She was very careful to walk a
• 13:18
  fine legal line here.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: She had to be right.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: She explicitly stated these conditions were not in any way
• 13:26
  an excuse for what happened.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: Okay, but that feels like an incredibly tough needle to
• 13:30
  thread for a jury.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: It's almost impossible.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, you're standing there saying, please don't excuse him.
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  What he did is inexcusable, but also please don't kill
• 13:38
  him because his biology made it inevitable.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: You're asking a jury of lay people to essentially become
• 13:43
  neurophilosophers over the course of two weeks.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: It's wild. And then there was this really bizarre detail
• 13:48
  introduced to regarding his interrogations, the zero alter ego.
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: Yes. During early interrogations with law enforcement, Horner repeatedly referred
• 13:58
  to an alter ego named Z.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: And he was attributing some of his darker impulses to
• 14:03
  this separate entity.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: He was, and defense experts utilize this as further evidence
• 14:09
  of a deeply disordered, fractured mind.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: But is that like a genuine psychological phenomenon like dissociative
• 14:16
  identity disorder or is it ma.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: Lingering malingering meaning faking it?
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like a guy who knows he's caught trying to
• 14:23
  fake being crazy to save his life.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: That is exactly the debate. It sparks. From a clinical perspective,
• 14:29
  extreme stress and pre existing severe mental illness can trigger
• 14:32
  profound association as a coping mechanism. Right, the mind essentially
• 14:36
  builds a firewall to distance itself from a horrific reality.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: The prosecutors are usually by that rarely.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: Prosecutors and forensic psychiatrists often view alter egos that conveniently
• 14:46
  emerge only after a brutal crime as malingering, a conscious
• 14:50
  fabrication designed to evade responsibility.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: So the defense presented it as tragedy, and the prosecution
• 14:55
  presented it as a manipulative tactic exactly.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: The defense also read a letter he wrote from jail
• 15:02
  apologizing to the family saying he'd done a terrible thing,
• 15:05
  had sleepless nights, and was praying for them.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: They were really attempting to show a capacity for remorse.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: They were, so the defense throws the entire kitchen sink
• 15:14
  at the wall, broken brain, hardware, fetal alcohol syndrome, chaotic upbringing,
• 15:19
  alter egos, letters of remorse.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: They are fighting for life without parole, arguing that if
• 15:25
  his brain is the problem, locking him in a cage
• 15:29
  removes him as a future threat. Right. But the prosecution
• 15:32
  has to counter this. They have to prove that the
• 15:34
  software made a deliberate, evil choice, regardless of whatever the
• 15:39
  hardware looks like.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: And the prosecution executed their rebuttal with devastating effectiveness.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: How do they do that?
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: By stripping away all the clinical jargon and grounding the
• 15:47
  jury back in the mechanical reality of the crime. They
• 15:50
  brought the jury right back to the delivery vent.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: They replayed the audio recorded.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: They did, and they showed a photograph of an uninjured
• 15:56
  athena on her knees in the truck.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Oh Man, that is so agonizing to even conceptualize.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: It is intensely traumatic evidence, but legally necessary for their argument.
• 16:07
  The prosecution used that photo and audio to demonstrate that
• 16:11
  this was not a sudden, impulsive loss of control resulting
• 16:15
  from a disordered frontal lobe.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: It was sustained.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: Yes, this was a sustained, deliberate, calculated series of actions.
• 16:23
  The audio captures coherent commands, threats, and a chillingly logical
• 16:27
  response to Athena's question about being a kidnapper.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: Right, and the prosecution had this incredibly stark counter argument
• 16:33
  in their closing statements.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: I remember reading this.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: They told the jury thousands of people in the world
• 16:39
  have disabilities autistic, they get up every day, but the
• 16:42
  one thing they never do is use it as a crutch.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: That is a powerful direct attack on the hardware defense
• 16:48
  it is.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: It's essentially saying biology is not destiny and using autism
• 16:52
  or ADHD to explain away the rape and murder of
• 16:54
  a child is an insult to everyone else navigating the
• 16:57
  world with those same diagnoses.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: What is truely fascinating here from a systemic perspective is
• 17:02
  how Texas law forces this incredibly nuanced, spectrum based reality
• 17:08
  of human psychology and neuroscience into an absolutely rigid binary framework.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: Right because the law doesn't care about nuance.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: Exactly, The law doesn't ask the jury to write an
• 17:19
  essay on the defendant's childhood trauma or debate the ethics
• 17:22
  of biological determinism. It asks them to answer specific, tightly defined.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: Question the special issues.
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: Right, Yes, the special issues. To sentence someone to death
• 17:33
  in Texas, the jury must unanimously answer yes to the
• 17:36
  first special issue, the question of future dangerousness.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's break that down for the listener. How does
• 17:42
  Texas law actually define future dangerousness? Are they asking if
• 17:46
  he's going to break out a prison like a comic
• 17:48
  book villain?
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: No? The legal definition asks whether there's a probability that
• 17:52
  the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence that would
• 17:54
  constitute a continuing threat to society.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: But if he's locked up for life, isn't society safe?
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: Well, society includes both the free world and prison in society, guards,
• 18:04
  other inmates, medical staff. The jury has to assess his
• 18:07
  psychiatric risk inside a maximum security facility.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Got it.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: Then they must answer no to the second special issue,
• 18:14
  the mitigation question. Are there sufficient mitigating circumstances regarding the
• 18:19
  defendant's character, background, or the circumstances of the prime to
• 18:24
  warrant a sentence of life imprisonment without parole rather than
• 18:27
  a death sentence.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: So all of that neurophilosophical debate over sixteen days boils
• 18:32
  down to two checkboxes for a human life.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: Yes, two checkboxes, and the mechanism is rigid. If the
• 18:37
  jury checks yes to future threat and no to sufficient mitigation.
• 18:41
  The death penalty is not merely an option.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: It's mandatory.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: It is mandatory under Texas law. The trial judge has
• 18:47
  absolutely no discretion to override it.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: And after roughly two and a half to three hours
• 18:51
  of deliberation, which honestly, after sixteen days of highly technical
• 18:55
  psychiatric testimony, feels incredibly fast, very fast, the jury rejected
• 18:59
  them mitigation narrative entirely. They checked the boxes yes to
• 19:02
  future threat, no to sufficient mitigation.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to May five, twenty twenty six, the
• 19:08
  day of formal sentencing.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: And this brings us to part three, the verdict and
• 19:13
  the echoes of grief, because the family's desile for closure
• 19:17
  essentially hit a brick wall on this day. It did
• 19:19
  because in Texas As we're going to explore a death
• 19:22
  sentence doesn't mean the state immediately carries out retribution. But
• 19:26
  inside that courtroom on May fifth, the emotional contrast was staggering.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: I can only imagine.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Listeners try to visualize this. The judge is reading the
• 19:35
  formal sentence of death by lethal injection. The room is
• 19:38
  radiating raw, visceral emotion. Family members are weeping. The prosecutors,
• 19:44
  who are hardened legal professionals use to seeing the worst
• 19:46
  of humanity, are crying.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: Even the judge was visibly moved.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the judge was emotional too, And standing in the
• 19:52
  exact center of all this weeping and grief is Tanner Horner,
• 19:55
  and he is completely, utterly blank, no reaction at all.
• 19:58
  He showed absolutely no visible.
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: React That lack of effect, that profound blankness, is almost
• 20:03
  universally interpreted by lay observers and victim's family as a
• 20:06
  sign of pure sociopathy, right, like a cold blooded monster,
• 20:09
  devoid of human empathy totally, And.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: That may well be true. However, from a strictly clinical perspective,
• 20:16
  extreme emotional blunting can also be a manifestation of the
• 20:20
  very severe psychiatric and neurodevelopmental issues the defense tried to highlight.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: Oh really yeah.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: In states of overwhelming stress, an autistic or deeply traumatized
• 20:30
  brain can sometimes trigger a shutdown response, presenting outwardly as apathy.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: But regardless of the neurological mechanism in that courtroom for
• 20:40
  that family, staring at his blank face was likely agonizing.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: It's the ultimate void where you desperately want to see
• 20:47
  remorse or at least terror.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: And into that void stepped Elijah Strand, Athena's uncle, to
• 20:52
  deliver the victim impact statement.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: Those statements are always so difficult to hear.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: We actually have his exact words, and they are so powerful.
• 20:58
  He looked directly at home and said, Tanner, Horner, I
• 21:01
  want you to hear this directly. You do not just
• 21:03
  take a life, You destroy the family. You took a
• 21:05
  little girl who trusted the world and repaid that innocence
• 21:08
  with violence. You are nothing.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: He went on to say, you are a footnote in
• 21:13
  Athenis story. Her name will forever be remembered, forever be celebrated,
• 21:17
  and everyone will forget you. And he ended by telling
• 21:20
  him he would face the wrath of God.
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: The victim impact statement is such a fascinating psychological mechanism
• 21:27
  within the justice system.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: Because it doesn't actually change anything legally.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: Speaking exactly, it has absolutely no bearing on the sentence.
• 21:33
  The sentence is already locked in by the jury, but
• 21:36
  it serves a vital, almost primal function. Oh so well,
• 21:40
  a criminal trial is inherently sterile. It translates blood and
• 21:43
  terror into clinical jargon, evidentiary exhibits, and penal codes. The
• 21:48
  victim impact statement briefly pauses the legal machinery and re
• 21:52
  centers the proceedings on the raw human costs.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: It forces everyone to look at the reality right.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: It forces the perpetrator, the judge, and the official state
• 22:00
  record to acknowledge the gaping, permanent hole left in the world.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: I want to pause here and ask you, the listener,
• 22:06
  to reflect for a second. If you were sitting in
• 22:09
  that courtroom and you heard those words spoken into the silence,
• 22:13
  and you watch that emotionless face, and you heard the
• 22:16
  gabble finally fall, would it feel like closure to you
• 22:21
  or would it just feel like a hollow echo?
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: Because for the Strand family, this verdict is incredibly complex.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: It is the paradox of legal justice. Athena's family expressed
• 22:31
  a measure of relief, a sense that society had spoken
• 22:35
  and validated their pain, but they explicitly stated it was enclosure.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: Christy Jack, a legal expert, who analyzed this case, made
• 22:43
  a profound philosophical point about this.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: What did she say?
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: She said that true justice, the kind of justice that
• 22:49
  actually fixes the wrong, would require reversing time and bringing.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: The child back, which is impossible.
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: Right, because that is physically impossible. Everything the legal system
• 22:57
  does is just a proxy. It is an artificial constra
• 23:00
  trying to balance a scale that is fundamentally broken.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: And you see this ripple effect of grief in how
• 23:06
  the community responded. They illuminated the courthouse in pink lights
• 23:10
  to symbolize her spirit.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: The prosecutor, James Stainton, told the press that this case
• 23:15
  should remind parents to hug their children a little tighter.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: But perhaps the most agonizing internal conflict came from Athena's grandfather,
• 23:22
  Mark Strand.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: Oh. Yes. Back when Horner was first arrested in twenty
• 23:26
  twenty two, Mark posted a message.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: He wrote, this flesh man wants that psycho to burn
• 23:31
  in hell for all eternity, Yet that gentle voice continues
• 23:35
  to tell me I need to forgive him.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: That statement encapsulates the absolute duality of the human response
• 23:41
  to profound trauma.
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: It really does. You have the primal, visceral evolutionary demand
• 23:46
  for violent retribution, wrestling against the higher order spiritual or
• 23:50
  moral desire for grace and forgiveness.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: It is a war inside the human soul.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: But of course, the legal system doesn't deal in grace
• 23:57
  and it doesn't deal in swift, visceral retribution. It deals
• 24:00
  and procedure.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: Exactly the family wants the book closed. But for the
• 24:04
  State of Texas, the sentence of death meant the state
• 24:07
  immediately shifted its focus to preservation.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: Keeping Tanner Horner alive and secure, so the decades of
• 24:13
  paperwork could begin.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to his new reality and part four
• 24:17
  of our deep dive, the Allen B. Polunski Unit.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: The Polunsky Unit is located about seventy miles north of
• 24:23
  Houston in Livingston, Texas, and.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: Within days of the sentencing, Horner was moved out of
• 24:28
  the county jail and into this facility.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: This is the state's primary housing unit for male death
• 24:33
  row inmates. And we really need to deeply understand the
• 24:37
  architecture and the psychology of this environment because it is extreme.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's get into the mechanical specifics of this sensory deprivation.
• 24:45
  Because Horner is placed in a single person cell. It
• 24:48
  is approximately sixty square feet.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: Think about that size.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: Listeners, picture a small bathroom or maybe half the size
• 24:54
  of a standard parking space. That is your entire universe.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: Inside that sixty square foot concrete box, there is a
• 25:00
  metal bed frame with a thin mattress, a combination stainless
• 25:04
  steel toilet and sink, and a narrow slit of a window.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: And he is locked inside that box for twenty two
• 25:09
  to twenty four hours a day. His meals are not
• 25:11
  eaten in a communal cafeteria. They are slid through a
• 25:14
  narrow beam showed in a solid steel door.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: What about basic human movement or hygiene Showers.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: Happen roughly every other day, and the process is highly militarized.
• 25:25
  The inmate is often placed in a small, separate chamber
• 25:27
  where they have to turn around and have their handcuffs
• 25:30
  removed through a slot in the door.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: And recreation time.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: If he's granted recreation time, it is one hour. It
• 25:36
  is entirely solitary. He has moved to a slightly larger
• 25:39
  fenced concrete cage often called a dog run.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: So no congregate dining. There are no group religious services,
• 25:47
  no work assignments, televisions are completely prohibitive.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: And zero contact with the outside world. Right.
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: Any visits from family or attorneys are strictly non contact.
• 25:56
  They take place behind thick security glass, speaking through a
• 25:59
  telephone receiver.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Depending on his specific custody level and behavior, he might
• 26:04
  eventually be allowed a small radio and limited access to reading, writing,
• 26:08
  and legal materials.
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: Okay, here's where this gets conceptually fascinating and deeply disturbing
• 26:13
  to me. Let's think back to the defense's entire argument
• 26:16
  during the penalty phase. Right, they argued that Tanner Horner
• 26:19
  has a severely impaired brain. They cited autism, ADHD, fetal
• 26:24
  alcohol syndrome, and frontal lobe abnormalities.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: They argued his biology makes the world overwhelming and unpredictable.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: Exactly, and now the State of Texas has taken that
• 26:33
  exact brain and placed it in an environment that is
• 26:36
  neurologically designed to break even a perfectly healthy human mind.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: That is exactly what solitary confinement does, and it's vital.
• 26:45
  We explain the neuroscience of how it breaks the brain.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: How does it actually work?
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: When you subject a human being to extreme sensory and
• 26:51
  social deprivation, the brain physically changes. The hippocampus, the area
• 26:57
  of responsible for memory and spatial orientation, can literally shrink. Wow,
• 27:01
  and the amigdala, the brain's fear center, becomes hyperactive. Without
• 27:06
  external stimuli to process, the brain starts firing internally, attempting
• 27:10
  to fill the void.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: This is why inmates and solitary confinement frequently develop vivid
• 27:14
  auditory and visual hallucinations.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: It's essentially forced psychosis. The sources, I mean, the research
• 27:20
  we've looked at into Polonski shows is not truly quiet,
• 27:23
  is it?
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: Not at all? It's a specific kind of sensory deprivation
• 27:26
  mixed with absolute acoustic chaos that sounds like torture. It is,
• 27:30
  you are deprived of meaningful human contact, natural light, and
• 27:34
  normal visual stimulation. But the auditory environment is punishing because
• 27:39
  it's all contrete and steel. Sound bounces endlessly, it's it's
• 27:43
  constantly laud Inmates report a constant echoing cacophony, shouting through
• 27:49
  heavy steel doors, the clanging of security gates, and the
• 27:52
  terrifying sounds of other men actively losing their minds.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the sensory deprivation leads to profound mental health deterior
• 28:01
  severe depression crippling paranoia and outright psychological collapse.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: I read accounts where inmates get so desperate for just
• 28:08
  a moment of human interaction, even aggressive interaction, that they
• 28:12
  will set fires in their own cells.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: Wait really, yeah, they will.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: Burn things just to force a guard to come to
• 28:17
  the door and acknowledge they exist.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: And Horner is entering this pressure cooker with a pre
• 28:21
  existing slate of severe psychological and neurological diagnoses.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: The reality is that placing a neurodivergent, bipolar individual into
• 28:28
  decades of solitary confinement risks severely exacerbating the exact conditions
• 28:33
  his defense brought up at trial.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: But here's the multimillion dollar question, why right?
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: Why do this?
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: Why does a man who pleaded guilty on day one,
• 28:42
  whose crime was caught on high definition video and audio,
• 28:46
  whose DNA is on the victim sit in a sixty
• 28:49
  square foot box for ten to fifteen years.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: Because, as we mentioned at the start, the gavel was
• 28:55
  just the starter pistol.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: The Texas justice system is about to activate its most
• 28:59
  labyrinth thought mechanism. Part five, Decoding the Appeals Machine.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: The appeals machine, it is automatic, it is heavily layered
• 29:08
  and it is agonizingly slow. When Hormer confirmed to the
• 29:11
  judge at his sentencing that he wanted a pellet council appointed,
• 29:14
  he turned the key to start this machine.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: I was looking at the timeline of these capital appeals
• 29:19
  and it's blowing my mind because it's not just one
• 29:21
  straight line up the judicial ladder to the Supreme Court.
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: No, it is not a straight line at all.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: It looks more like a terrifying, high stakes game of
• 29:27
  shoots and ladders. You go up a level, then you
• 29:29
  get kicked back down to the trial court, then back
• 29:31
  up to the FEDS. Walk us through the anatomy of
• 29:34
  this delay.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: It's essential to understand that the state cannot legally set
• 29:37
  an execution date until this entire multi tiered process is
• 29:41
  completely exhausted. It happens in three massive steps. Step one
• 29:46
  is the automatic direct appeal.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: Okay, automatic direct appeal. Texas law mandates this for every
• 29:53
  single death sentence.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: Even if the inmate says I did it, I accept the.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: Punishment yes initially yeah, and then may can eventually attempt
• 30:01
  to become a volunteer and waive their appeals, but the
• 30:04
  direct appeal is automatically initiated to ensure the state didn't
• 30:08
  commit a gross error in securing.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: The conviction, so it bypasses the lower appellate courts and
• 30:13
  goes straight to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals or
• 30:15
  the CCA in Austin. This is the state's highest criminal court.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: Think of the direct appeal like a highly specialized proofreader
• 30:22
  checking a manuscript for typos. They're only allowed to look
• 30:26
  at what's already printed on the page, the official trial record.
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: They aren't investigating new facts right now.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: No, they are looking purely for legal and procedural errors
• 30:34
  made by the judge.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: Were the attorneys That's a perfect analogy. The court appointed
• 30:39
  appellate attorneys are combing through thousands of pages of transcripts, motions,
• 30:43
  and evidentiary rulings.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: They are asking, did the judge make an improper ruling
• 30:48
  on admitting the van audio? Was their prosecutorial misconduct during
• 30:52
  closing arguments? Did Horner's trial attorneys provide ineffective assistance?
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: They are specifically looking for constitutional violations like Eighth Amendment
• 31:01
  claims regarding how mitigation was handled or how the jury
• 31:05
  instructions define future dangerousness.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: Just reading and briefing that record takes months. Their defense
• 31:12
  files a massive brief. The state takes months to write
• 31:15
  a rebuttal oral arguments are scheduled, and eventually the court
• 31:19
  issues a decision.
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: This direct appeal phase alone typically takes one to two years,
• 31:23
  and if the.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: CCA affirms the sentence, Horner's lawyers can petition the US
• 31:27
  Supreme Court. They file a writ of serdhiorari.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: Which is simply a formal request for the Supreme Court
• 31:32
  to review the decision of a lower court.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: Wait for those of us who aren't lawyers, granting cercuary
• 31:37
  just means that Supreme Court actually agrees to look at
• 31:39
  the case right, which they almost never do.
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: Correct. The Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions a year
• 31:46
  and grants sertiari to only a tiny fraction. So, assuming
• 31:49
  the Supreme Court declines to hear it, step one fails
• 31:53
  the sentence is affirmed, we move to step two. State
• 31:57
  post conviction habeas corpus.
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: The direct appeal was the proofreader sat habeas corpus is
• 32:03
  like hiring an investigative journalist.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good way to look at it.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: They aren't restricted to what's already on the page. They
• 32:09
  are allowed to find out if the author plagiarize the
• 32:11
  book or hid notes off screen. They could bring in
• 32:14
  entirely new outside evidence exactly.
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: Habeas corpus is a fundamental legal mechanism that allows an
• 32:20
  incarcerated person to challenge the legality of their imprisonment based
• 32:24
  on facts outside the original trial record.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: For example, if brand new evidence of innocence emerges, which
• 32:29
  is highly unlikely in Owner's case, or if they uncover
• 32:32
  hidden evidence that the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence, or.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: If they find proof that the trial defense team entirely
• 32:39
  failed to investigate a crucial piece of mitigation.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: And this petition doesn't go straight to the High court,
• 32:45
  it actually loops back down to the original trial level
• 32:48
  court in tern County for fact finding. Right.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: Yes, the judge reviews the new claims, makes a recommendation,
• 32:54
  and then the whole thing gets routed back up the
• 32:56
  ladder to the Court of Criminal Appeals.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: We are loobing back to the state court. It's all
• 33:00
  over again, and that takes several more years easily.
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: The state courts are heavily backlogged, and once the state
• 33:08
  habeas process is finally fully exhausted, we move to the
• 33:12
  true labyrinth. Step three. Federal habeas review.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: We finally cross over from the state system into the
• 33:17
  federal system, and this is governed by a law with
• 33:20
  a very intimidating name.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: The Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act or ADPA.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: I know this was passed in the nineties, heavily influenced
• 33:28
  by the Oklahoma City bombing, and it was supposedly designed
• 33:31
  to speed up the death penalty, But how does it
• 33:33
  actually work mechanically? Why is it still such a massive hurdle?
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: ADPA fundamentally change the relationship between state and federal courts.
• 33:41
  Before AEDPA, federal courts could look at a state death
• 33:45
  penalty case and say, we think the state court got
• 33:48
  the law wrong, so we are overturning the sentence.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: But ADPA changed that.
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: It did. ADPA strip federal courts of a lot of
• 33:55
  that power. Under AADPA, a federal judge cannot overturn a
• 33:59
  state court can simply because they disagree with it. They
• 34:02
  can only overturn it if the state court's decision was
• 34:05
  contrary to or involved an unreasonable application of clearly established federal.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: Law, or if it was based on an unreasonable determination
• 34:13
  of the facts. Exactly so Eli five explained like Umbindfelow.
• 34:17
  The federal court can't just say that Texas Court was wrong.
• 34:20
  They have to say that Texas Court was so outrageously
• 34:23
  objectively unreasonable that no competent judge could have possibly made that.
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: Decision, which is an incredibly high bar to clear.
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: It is an intentionally massive hurdle designed to force federal
• 34:33
  courts to defer to state courts. But because the stakes
• 34:36
  are life and death, defense attorneys litigate exactly what unreasonable
• 34:39
  means for years.
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: This federal review starts in the U. S District Court.
• 34:44
  From there it can be appealed to the Fifth Circuit
• 34:46
  Court of Appeals, which covers Texas and is notoriously conservative, And.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: From there yet another petition for serdi Urri can be
• 34:54
  sent to the US Supreme Court.
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: And at every single one of these federal levels, the
• 34:59
  defense attorneys are filing motions to stay the execution.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: The federal courts have the power to issue injunctions, freezing
• 35:05
  the timeline completely while they review the paperwork, and even
• 35:09
  after all of that, even if the federal habeas fails,
• 35:12
  the defense can launch completely separate civil.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: Lawsuits, yes often under Section nineteen eighty three of the
• 35:18
  Civil Rights.
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: Act, what exactly is a Section nineteen eighty three claim
• 35:21
  In the context of the death penalty.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: Section nineteen eighty three allows citizens to sue the government
• 35:26
  for civil rights violations in capital cases. Inmates frequently use
• 35:30
  this to challenge the actual method of execution.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: Texas uses a single drug legal injection protocol using pendobarbital right.
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: Yes, defense attorneys will file Section nineteen eighty three lawsuits
• 35:41
  arguing that the specific drug, or the way the state
• 35:43
  obtained it, or the expiration date of the batch creates
• 35:46
  a risk of severe pain, thereby violating the Eighth Amendment
• 35:50
  ban on cruel and Unusual punishment.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: These lawsuits can trigger separate injunctions and delay in execution
• 35:56
  for months or years.
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: It's only after every single one of these avenues, direct appeal,
• 36:01
  state habeas, federal habeas, and civil rights challenges are entirely
• 36:05
  completely exhausted that the trial court can finally set an actual,
• 36:10
  binding execution date.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: And even then, under Texas law, the date has to
• 36:15
  be set at least ninety one days in the future.
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: Let's contextualize this within the broader landscape of capital punishment.
• 36:20
  Texas has historically led the nation and executions by a
• 36:23
  wide margin, executing over five hundred people since the nineteen seventies.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: But the appetite for capital punishment is shifting, isn't it?
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: It is the numbers have been steadily declining. There were
• 36:32
  only five executions in Texas in twenty twenty five and
• 36:35
  only three in the first half of twenty twenty six, and.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: A major reason for that decline is that the Supreme
• 36:41
  Court has started putting guardrails on who can actually be
• 36:43
  executed right, which brings us to the legal precedent that
• 36:47
  I think will define ten or horners next ten years.
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: Akins v.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: Virginia exactly. Akins v. Virginia is a landmark two thousand
• 36:55
  and two Supreme Court case that explicitly ruled the execution
• 36:58
  of people with intellectual desas disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment.
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: The Court reason that intellectual disability inherently diminishes a person's
• 37:06
  capacity to understand the consequences of their actions or to
• 37:09
  assist in their own defense, making the ultimate punishment disproportionate.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: But here is the masses legal gray area. Atkins primarily
• 37:18
  focused on intellectual disability meaning a low IQ typically below seventy,
• 37:22
  combined with deficits and adaptive functioning Tanner. Horner wasn't presented
• 37:26
  as having a low IQ. He got his high school diploma.
• 37:29
  He was diagnosed with autism ADHD and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: So how does Texas law handle neurodivergence that severely impairs
• 37:37
  social and executive function but doesn't necessarily tank your IQ score?
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: That is the exact battleground his appellate lawyers will fight on.
• 37:45
  While Horner's specific diagnoses might not strictly meet the rigid
• 37:49
  clinical criteria for intellectual disability as defined by Atkins, his
• 37:54
  legal team will aggressively use his severe mental health and
• 37:57
  neurodevelopmental claims to prolong the federal review process.
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: They will argue that the structural damage to his frontal
• 38:04
  lobe from fetal alcohol syndrome or the profound social deficits
• 38:08
  of his autism render him functionally equivalent to someone with
• 38:12
  an intellectual disability in terms of moral culpability.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: They will fight over every nuance of his cognitive capacity
• 38:18
  in federal court.
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: Okay, I have to step back and look at the
• 38:21
  whole board here, because I know many people listening are
• 38:23
  thinking exactly what I'm thinking, which is is the system
• 38:26
  actually serving anyone. Let's look at the costs. Critics point
• 38:30
  out that it costs taxpayers millions of dollars to fund
• 38:33
  this decade's long legal battle. It is vastly more expensive
• 38:37
  to prosecute a death penalty case and fund the mandatory
• 38:40
  appeals than it is to lock someone up for life.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: That's a great point, But more importantly, let's look at
• 38:45
  Athena's family, the victims. They call this process revictimization.
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: For the next ten to fifteen years, every time an
• 38:53
  appellate brief is filed in Austin, every time a federal
• 38:56
  judge issues are ruling in the Fifth Circuit, Tanner Horner's
• 38:59
  face will be back on the evening news.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: The Strand family is going to be forced to relive
• 39:04
  the absolute worst day of their lives over and over
• 39:07
  and over again for a decade.
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: You're highlighting the most profound, difficult dilemma of this entire
• 39:13
  deep dive. You have two deeply opposing yet fundamentally valid
• 39:17
  moral imperatives colliding head on.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: Let's hear them.
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: On one side, you have the agonizing delay that undeniably
• 39:24
  torments the victim's families. It is a form of psychological torture.
• 39:28
  To deny them finality, to keep the man who murdered
• 39:31
  their child in the headlines for decades. The system demands
• 39:34
  their perpetual suffering in the name of procedure. And on
• 39:37
  the other side, on the other side, you have the absolute, vital,
• 39:40
  non negotiable necessity of preventing horrific state errors.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: You mean executing an innocent person.
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: Yes, the history of the American justice system is heavily
• 39:49
  scarred by the reality of wrongful convictions. We have seen
• 39:53
  well over one hundred people exonerated from death rows across
• 39:56
  the country, often due to DNA evidence that emerged decades
• 39:59
  after their trials. Right, the appellate machine is built to
• 40:02
  be incredibly slow, incredibly redundant, and incredibly layered because the
• 40:07
  state is taking an irreversible action. The appeals process is
• 40:11
  the ultimate fail safe against the state committing murder itself.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: But in a case like Tanner Horner's, this is where
• 40:16
  the friction really burns. He pleaded guilty, the abduction is
• 40:20
  on audio, his DNA is on the victim, he led
• 40:23
  the police to the body. Is there really a legitimate
• 40:26
  fear of executing an innocent man in this specific case?
• 40:29
  Why does the fail safe apply to him.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: Because legally, structurally, the justice system cannot afford to treat
• 40:35
  cases differently based on how obvious the guilt seems at
• 40:38
  the trial level.
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: The law must be blind.
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: The procedural safeguards, the mandatory direct appeals, the habeas reviews,
• 40:44
  they must apply equally to the man called on high
• 40:46
  definition tape and the man convicted purely on circumstantial eyewitness testimony.
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: Because if you make an exception.
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: If the courts create a fast track for cases where
• 40:55
  guilt seems obvious, you erode the very precedent that protects
• 40:59
  the potently innocent. You weaken the structure of the failsafe.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: So we are entirely trapped in the timeline, and the
• 41:06
  variance of that timeline is staggering. Texas has executed an
• 41:11
  inmate in as little as two hundred and fifty two
• 41:13
  days after sentencing, though that usually only happens when an
• 41:16
  inmate voluntarily drops their appeals.
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: But the average weight on death row in Texas right
• 41:21
  now is about eleven years, and many men wait fifteen, twenty,
• 41:25
  even thirty years in that sixty square foot box.
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: Given Horner's guilty plea, which effectively removes many of the
• 41:30
  standard avenues for appealing the factual evidence of the crime,
• 41:33
  his timeline might skew slightly shorter than the maximum.
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: However, his complex layered mental health claims, the autism, the FASD,
• 41:41
  the frontal lobe abnormalities will almost certainly be the absolute
• 41:45
  focus of exhaustive federal appeals.
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: Legal experts tracking this case currently predict Horner will wait
• 41:51
  at least eight to ten years before an execution date
• 41:54
  becomes legally viable.
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: Eight to ten years. That is potentially double or triple
• 41:59
  the amount of time has even passed since he murdered
• 42:01
  Athena in twenty twenty two.
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: During all that time, the state pays for his housing,
• 42:06
  the state pays for his court appointed appellate council. Judicial
• 42:10
  resources are stretched thin, and the Strand family just waits.
• 42:14
  Speaker 2: There are a few alternative outcomes, though they are statistically
• 42:18
  highly unlikely. He could receive clemency, having his sentence commuted
• 42:23
  to life without parole by the governor, but.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: In Texas the governor can only grant clemency upon the
• 42:27
  recommendation of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which almost
• 42:30
  never happens.
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: A procedural error could theoretically be found that forces a retrial, which,
• 42:35
  given the evidence, would likely just result in a life
• 42:38
  sentence instead of a death sentence.
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: Or, as we discussed, Horner could become a volunteer. He
• 42:43
  could legally waive all his remaining federal appeals and ask
• 42:46
  the state to execute him, drastically shortening the weight.
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: But given his age and the aggressive mitigation offense, that
• 42:52
  is also.
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: Rare, so the most statistically likely reality is routine mind
• 42:57
  numbing monotony in a concrete box and living in Texas,
• 43:01
  punctuated by highly technical legal filings in Austin and Washington,
• 43:04
  d C. For the next ten years.
• 43:06
  Speaker 2: And for the Strand family, each of those legal filings
• 43:09
  will tear open the wound. Yet what stands out is
• 43:11
  their incredible resilience.
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: They are not simply waiting in the dark. They are
• 43:15
  actively celebrating Athena's memory.
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: They are supporting other grieving families in the community, working
• 43:20
  to navigate and heal from profound generational pain, refusing to
• 43:25
  let Tanner Horner's timeline dictate their entire existence, which.
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: Brings us back to the core tension we introduced at
• 43:30
  the top of this deep dive. We started this journey
• 43:33
  on a normal November evening in Paradise, Texas, a horrific,
• 43:37
  undeniably tragic crime committed against an innocent seven year old
• 43:40
  girl wearing blue jeans with embroidered flowers.
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: And we have followed the thread all the way into
• 43:46
  a massive, grinding, bureaucratic machine where the concept of justice
• 43:51
  doesn't mean swift retribution.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: It means a sixty square foot concrete box, sensory deprivation,
• 43:56
  and a decade of dense constitutional paperwork.
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: It forces us to confront a deeply uncomfortable reality about
• 44:03
  the systems we build. It asks us to look at
• 44:05
  what justice actually looks like in mechanical practice versus the neat,
• 44:10
  resolved way it looks in theory or on a movie screen.
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: And that is exactly why understanding this labyrinth is so
• 44:15
  crucial for you, our listener. It's not just about knowing
• 44:18
  the timeline of a true crime case. It's because this machine,
• 44:22
  the Texas Death Penalty Apparatus, the appellate courts, the Polensky Unit,
• 44:26
  is a direct physical reflection of our society's ultimate conflicting valuers.
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: We are constantly agonizingly trying to balance the primal, deeply
• 44:35
  human desire for measured retribution against a clinical legal obsession
• 44:40
  with procedural finality.
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: The system isn't broken. The terrifying part is that it
• 44:44
  is operating exactly as a built to operate. And as
• 44:46
  Elijahstrand noted in that courtroom, Athena's light endures, she will
• 44:50
  be remembered. Her family will ensure that. But the legal
• 44:53
  machinery that Horner activated, it just churns on in the dark,
• 44:56
  entirely indifferent to the emotional toll it extracts.
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: It trades time for certainty, It sacrifices closure for procedural perfection.
• 45:05
  But it leaves us with a profound, unresolved dilemma.
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: I think you have a final thought to leave everyone with.
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: I do, and I want to leave you the listener,
• 45:13
  with a final lingering question to ponder long after this
• 45:16
  conversation stops. If a society builds a justice machine that
• 45:20
  is deliberately designed to ensure absolute certainty before the state
• 45:23
  takes a human life, but that very machine requires inflicting
• 45:27
  decades of agonizing, re traumatizing procedural delay on the victims'
• 45:31
  families just to guarantee its own accuracy. At what point
• 45:35
  does the pursuit of perfect justice become its own form
• 45:38
  of cruelty.
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: We'll leave you to unpack that one. Thanks for diving
• 45:41
  deep with us.