ACLU Attorney Reflects on Texas Death Penalty Case
Marking World Day Against the Death Penalty, Claudia Van Wyk recounts witnessing Richard Tabler’s final moments and the toll of state executions.
Claudia Van Wyk is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project. She spent 14 years with the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia, where she met Richard Tabler, who had been convicted of murder and was challenging a death sentence.
At the ACLU, Claudia continued to work on Richard’s legal appeals, including a petition in October 2024 asking the Supreme Court to review Richard’s case.
On February 13, 2025, I traveled to Texas’s death row at the Polunksy Unit in Livingston, Texas, to perform my last service for my client, Richard Tabler: helping him to die.
Claudia Van Wyk has spent more than four decades working on death penalty cases, supporting people through the hardest and darkest times of their lives.
Author's summary: ACLU attorney reflects on a Texas death penalty case.
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