Texas Executes Notorious Gang Leader Christopher Young – He Changed on Death Row, But Texas Still…
Everything is fine. And everything is okay, baby. I miss my dad. Well, tell him why. I miss my dad so much, and I don’t want him to go. Well, tell him why. Because I don’t see him often. And I don’t like seeing him behind glass. You shouldn’t have done this now, honey. Tell him right now, honey. I don’t want to miss my dad.
I don’t want to try to do that because I’ll miss my dad so much. Look at me. And I don’t…And I don’t see him often anymore, because he’s in prison. And he is behind the glass. I don’t like it. I can’t do this. It’s okay, baby. Christopher Young sits in a cell at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit on the night of July 16, 2018.
And for the first time in almost 14 years, there is nothing left to appeal. No petition is being considered. No court has yet issued a ruling. No governor’s desk with his name on it. Waiting for a signature that never comes. A few hours ago, he sat across the table from the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole and asked them a question he already suspected he knew the answer to.
If Thomas Whitaker could plan the murder of his own family and get away with it, why couldn’t Christopher Young, who killed once in a haze of alcohol and cocaine and 21 years of unbridled grief, receive the same mercy? The council did not deliberate for long. Unanimously. No mitigation of sentence. Tomorrow the state of Texas is going to kill him. He is 34 years old.
He spent more of his adult life on death row than off it. And somewhere in that concrete box, in those 23 hours of silence a day, he became a different person than the one who walked into Hasmukh Patel’s shop on a Sunday morning in November 2004. He mentors teenagers he will never meet. He persuades other prisoners to go to the brink of violence, and once to the brink of suicide.
The son of the man he killed spent the last few weeks of his life fighting to keep Christopher alive. This is not fiction. This is not the defense attorney’s thesis. This is a documented, confirmed fact. And none of this will save him. This is a sentence I want you to familiarize yourself with before we go anywhere. Because this case is not unfolding the way you want it to.
This is not a story about an innocent person. This is also not a monster story. This is a story about a boy who lost one important thing in his life at the age of 8 and was given nothing to replace it. Who became exactly what that absence had turned him into, and who spent his last decade proving that people can change in a way that still doesn’t undo what they’ve already taken away.
Both of these things are true. He had become someone worth saving, and yet he had to die for who he was that morning, who he had ceased to be . I want you to stay with me through this, because by the end, I don’t think you’ll have a clear answer. It’s just that the truth is laid out in full, and there is a question that I will leave you with, and to which I honestly don’t know the answer.
Leave a comment when we get there. I want to know where you will stay. Let ‘s go back to the beginning, because you can’t understand what happened in that store without understanding what happened to an 8-year-old boy 16 years ago. Christopher Anthony Young was born in San Antonio, Texas, the second child of a mother who had given birth to her first two children before she was 18 years old.
He was not expecting a slow, gentle growing up. His mother moved the family back and forth between San Antonio and Wisconsin, chasing stability that never came, changing relationships that came and went, and taking pieces of the household with her each time. It was not a childhood built on routine. But there was one person who gave him form, his father, Willard Young.
When Christopher was with Willard, something settled inside him. Willard was the version of stability that was missing in his life, the father who showed up, who made the boy feel like there was a place in the world made just for him. And it was next to Willard that another version of Christopher found his place to exist.
Because there was another version. The teachers who took him to class remembered the boy, who they said was one of the sharpest minds they had ever taught. He could hear a piece of music once, once, and play it on the violin. He took the cello and bass. He would sit at the chessboard and move with a kind of quiet, unsettling confidence that made grown men stop and take notice.
There was a version of Christopher Young’s life where none of what I’m about to tell you happens. Where that child gets into a conservatory or university, or just becomes an adult who never has to sit in a room and report for the worst thing they ever did. This version of him was real. She just never had a chance to grow up.
In 1991 , when Christopher was 8 years old, Willard Young was shot and killed on the street, likely during a drug deal linked to his own gang connections. He died the way many men in this world die. Quickly, brutally, without goodbye, without warning. Christopher was not around . It didn’t matter. The loss hit him like a wall falling on him, and there was no one to help him endure its burden.
No psychologist would let him sit. No teacher was prepared to understand what was happening to this child in real time. He was simply expected to keep moving forward, and he did. Only now the direction he was going was the only direction that made sense to a grieving 8-year-old boy without a map or guidebook. He began to look for another version of what his father had given him.
He found it in his uncle, who was a gang member. A man who was eventually sentenced to 50 years in prison for the murder of a rival gang member . But even before this sentence was pronounced , the uncle had already done what he was going to do to Christopher, which was to show him the door to this life and let him pass through it.
And here’s something that most of the coverage of this case really didn’t like. Christopher’s childhood was shaped by more than just his father’s murder. Court records and family testimony later revealed that one of his mother’s partners raped Christopher’s sister. Another mocked Christopher himself. This was not a home that was destroyed by one tragedy and then found its footing again.
Violence was the basis. That was the air temperature in that house, and a child who grows up breathing that usually doesn’t come out the other side unscathed. He is learning to wear it . Eventually, without any training, he learns to be him. By the time he was 12, the Bloods had taken possession of him. And I want to be honest about what it meant to him, because it wasn’t about looking good or impressing anyone.
This was something he had been missing in his life since he was eight years old. The older men looked at him and said, “We see you. You are important. You belong somewhere.” For a child who had that taken away from him in one shot, this offer was not something he could refuse. His teachers watched this and felt powerless to stop it.
They still talk about the violin, about chess, about the child with obvious talent who was disappearing in front of them, and no one around had the resources to intervene. He dropped out of school after the ninth grade, and once he graduated and fully immersed himself in life, his track record began to accumulate the way track records accumulate.
Slowly at first, then all at once. Possession of marijuana , evading arrest, three separate convictions for assault causing bodily harm. And , according to testimony at his capital murder trial, two of those attacks were committed against his own mother when he was still a minor. Wait a minute. The woman who carried him, who tried in every broken way to keep the family together through all this instability, he laid his hands on her . Twice.
This is not a footnote. This is who Christopher Young was becoming before his path crossed with the stranger. He was a bad guy who made one terrible mistake. This was a young man with an accumulated, well- documented pattern of violence that had already reached those closest to him . And this scheme was about to reach someone even closer.
Her name was Challa Riley. In 2004, she was Christopher’s girlfriend, and by September of that year, she was 8 months pregnant with his child. For 8 months she carried in her body a life that was half his. And Christopher Young beat her. She stayed for reasons that are complex and human, and deserve more understanding than condemnation.
Women in her position often do that. But on the night of November 20, 2004, she told him it was over. It’s all over with her. He beat her again that same night. This is the man who woke up on the morning of November 21, 2004 . Not a prodigy, not a guy with a violin, but a 21-year-old guy with bloodshot eyes, cocaine, and about 15-20 bottles of beer still circulating in his system, who had just beaten up his pregnant girlfriend a few hours earlier.
Who had three convictions for assault, and who had lived in a gang for almost ten years. He was awake. He didn’t eat. He was armed and falling to pieces. What happened that Sunday morning unfolds in three parts, and in each of them there is a victim. I need you to get along with all three of them, because the story of that morning doesn’t begin in the store.
It begins somewhere else, with a woman you’ve probably never heard of. Her name is Daphne Edwards. She lives in a small apartment on the east side of San Antonio, a block from a store called Mini Food Mart. She is the mother of three girls. The eldest is seven years old. The youngest one is even smaller.
This morning she goes out for less than 5 minutes, just to walk to the store and buy cigarettes, leaving her daughters at breakfast. When she returns home and returns, her daughters are standing right where she left them, safe, eating breakfast. Almost immediately someone knocks. She thinks it’s her sister. She opens the door.
Christopher Young stands in the doorway with a silver revolver pointed directly at her head. He pushes inside before she can react. He demands money. She opens her purse and hands her everything she has – $28. He looks at her and says that this is not enough, that she will have to give him something more. Her three daughters are sitting right there.
There is nowhere to send them. This is one room. There is no other room. These children sit in that apartment and witness what happens next, and there is no amount of careful language that can soften the cost of that . Christopher Young sexually assaults Daphne Edwards at gunpoint while her daughters are in the room.
At one point, because she doesn’t follow his orders quickly enough, he shoots at the floor at her feet. I want you to sit with the sound of this gunshot in a small apartment, with three little girls watching you. Later, DNA evidence confirmed everything Daphne told the police. Years later, from his prison cell, Christopher Young denied that it had happened.
DNA disagreed with his conclusions. When it was all over, he told her to wear something he had picked out for her, without underwear, because they were going together. She told him she wasn’t leaving her children. He looked at her and said, “You’ve done this before. I saw you. Then he did something that was remembered by everyone who had ever studied this matter.
He walked up to each of Daphne’s three daughters, one at a time , knelt down, and kissed each of them on the cheek. He told them that their mother would be back soon. Then he kicked Daphne out the door. He made her drive his red Mazda Protege to the front of the complex, then decided he wanted to drive himself.
When he goes around the car to change seats, the passenger door is still open. Daphne sees people in the parking lot. As soon as he sits down, she runs screaming to her cousin’s apartment and doesn’t stop. Christopher Young drives away in his stolen car. He drives exactly one block. He stops at the Mini Food Mart, the same store where Daphne went half an hour ago to get cigarettes.
The store is owned by 53-year-old Hasmukh Patel. His regular customers call him Hash. Hesh Patel came to America and created something real only from years of honest work. This store was not a temporary measure or a side job. It was proof, physical and daily, of everything he believed in. This hard work meant something.
This community meant something, that coming to the people around you every morning was a life worth living. He knew his clients by name. He was behind that counter before the rest of the city was fully awake. He is there at 9:37 a.m. when a man in a black shirt and light-colored shorts walks through his door. The surveillance camera records everything.
Christopher Young approaches the counter and tells Patel to hand over the money. Patel moves towards the cash register. The gun doesn’t let go of him. Young repeats the demand. Patel keeps moving. The gun fires once, then again. Patel manages to press the panic button before he falls. The alarm system permeates the building.
Young moves to the cash register, then changes his mind, turns around, and walks out the door, hiding the gun under his shirt. He gets into the Mazda stolen by Daphne Edwards and drives away. Outside, a regular customer named Getty Helton is sitting in her car, clutching her lottery tickets, when she hears gunshots. She calls out to Hesh through the door.
There is no answer. She runs to the payphone and calls the police. Another customer, Raul Vasquez Jr., pulls into the parking lot at almost the same moment this happens. He hears gunfire through the window of his truck, looks up in time to see a man leaning over the counter and shooting, watches as he gets out, gets into a small red car, and drives off.
He tries to follow him. Can’t make it. He calls the police and provides a description of the car and a partial license plate. Hasmukh Patel dies from a gunshot wound to the chest. He didn’t do anything except be exactly where he always was, doing exactly what he always did. He leaves behind his wife Mina and two children: son Mitesh, who is in his early 20s, and daughter Renal.
He leaves behind a community that depended on his morning presence and a life he built with his own hands, which Christopher Young took from him in a robbery he did n’t even have time to complete. He did n’t take anything from that cash register, not a single dollar. Around 11:00 that morning, a San Antonio police officer spots a red Mazda parked near a house a few miles away.
The partial license plate matches. The man behind the wheel is wearing a black shirt and light-colored shorts. A woman is sitting in the passenger seat. Christopher Young is arrested right where he sits. Tests on his hands revealed traces of a firearm. Like on his shirt. Like on the steering wheel. Athel’s blood is found on one of Yang’s socks .
Getty Helton and Raul Vasquez identify him without hesitation. Surveillance footage shows his face, hands, and gun. In February 2006, after a trial that moved faster than many feature films, the jury deliberated for 2 hours and returned a verdict of murder, punishable by death. The judge sentences Christopher Anthony Young to death . He is 23 years old.
He sits in the courtroom and looks straight ahead . Not shocked, not defiant. Just a young man watching the door close forever . He was shackled, loaded into a van, and taken to Polunsky Prison in Livingston, Texas. Death row. He expects a war zone . His entire life was organized around violence, walled off . Gang politics, territory, the constant threat of someone coming for you.
He is preparing for the same . Instead, he finds silence. 23 hours a day in a 60 square foot cell. A steel door that opens once a day for an hour of solitary rest. A tray of food pushed under the door three times a day. No real human contact. Only the camera, the walls, the hum of light, and his own mind bouncing off every surface, with nowhere for him to go .
For a man who has spent his life running from peace, this shatters something in him. At first he struggles with it. Fury, pushing himself until his arms give out , fists against concrete walls, still wearing his gangster identity as if it meant something here. But that’s not true. No one on death row cares who you worked with on the outside.
Here, the only thing that can really kill you is your own mind, left alone with everything you’ve done. With Daphne Edwards, with Chala Riley, with Hasmuk Patel, with his own mother, with everyone his hands had ever touched. This reckoning eventually finds him, whether he is ready for it or not. And it all starts with a man named Reginald Blendon.
Reg is also from San Antonio. Same neighborhood, same upbringing, same craving for the streets as Christopher. He would compete with rivals. From the outside, the two of them would be enemies by default. It does n’t mean anything here anymore . What attracts Christopher to Reg is not his toughness.
This is something he has almost never encountered in his life up to this point–peace. Reg acts like a man who, deep down, has made a decision and isn’t going to back down from it. He no longer shows anger. He’s not trying to prove anything to anyone. He is simply present, calm, reading, speaking slowly and thoughtfully. One day, Christopher asks him for a book, expecting something stern and familiar.
Reg asks him for a thin old paperback called “How a Man Thinks” by James Allen. Christopher almost puts it down after the first page. The language is old, almost instructive. Something still makes him keep reading. Your thoughts shape your life. For a man who has never been asked to truly rethink his own thoughts in over 20 years, this idea hits like a detonation.
He starts reading everything Reg hands him. They pass books back and forth under the gap at the bottom of their cell doors. They write notes to each other. They argue about what they read and push each other to delve deeper. Reg teaches him how to breathe through anger, not become it. How to react, not react.
How to put up with pain without turning it into violence. He shows Christopher something that will define the rest of his life. What happened to him as a child, the murder of his father, the abuse in that house, the complete absence of anyone to show him another way—none of this was his fault. But what he does with it from now on is entirely his responsibility.
Christopher hears it, really hears it, and he begins to change. Not for the sake of the parole board , not for the sake of a petition for clemency that does n’t yet exist, not for the sake of public image. He changes because for the first time in his life he understands who he has become and what it has cost the people around him, and he cannot live within this understanding and remain the same person.
In 2009, the state of Texas executed Reginald Blandon . Christopher lost his father at the age of eight. Now he loses the person who exposed him and showed what was underneath. It would be the easiest thing in the world to let this grief turn to rage again, to close the door Reg had opened , and to go back to who he had always been.
He doesn’t do that. Instead, he becomes what Reg was to him. He begins to mentor younger men who end up on death row just like him – angry, lost, dressed in an identity that means nothing here . He calms the men through the vents before the confrontation escalates into violence. He intervenes once when another prisoner is about to attack a guard.
He calms another man from the countryside when that man is preparing to commit suicide. It helps correctional officers de-escalate situations that could become dangerous in a matter of seconds . The 12 inmates would eventually sign an affidavit that Christopher Young had become a true force for peace on death row.
Not a show for a parole hearing , but a documented pattern over many years. He writes for youth programs on the loose. He is developing a curriculum from his cell, which he calls ” Reaching Our Youth from Within.” This is an attempt to have exactly the kind of conversation with at- risk kids that no one ever had with him when he was 12 years old and standing at the same crossroads.
He keeps in touch with his three daughters through letters and phone calls, trying to make sure they know who he is becoming, and not just someone who let them down before they were old enough to remember him to others. And then something happens that almost no one could have predicted. Mitesh Patel, the son of the man Christopher killed, decides he doesn’t want Christopher dead.
At that point, Mitesh had been carrying the guilt of his father’s murder for over ten years. He grew up without Harsh Patel at every important stage. Such a loss does not solve the problem. It lives within a person and shapes the direction of their growth. And it shaped Mitesh into something that almost no one around him expected.
He begins to appear at rallies organized by Christopher’s legal team. He talks to local and national reporters about why he’s asking Texas to spare the life of the man who took his father. He is testifying during a clemency petition. He tries to arrange a personal meeting through the prison’s victim services department , but is told that this is not possible.
So he writes a letter. Christopher’s response comes through the staff. Chris killed my dad. The fact that Texas killed him doesn’t change that. Two wrongs don’t make a right. My dad did something positive in his life, and Chris is doing something positive in his now. If the state takes that away from him, it’s no different than what Chris did.
The son of the man he killed is publicly campaigning to keep his father’s killer alive. Nobody says: ” Let them go, let people go free and let them do whatever they want.” There has to be a better way to handle situations like this. Again , killing him with two wrongs doesn’t make him right. You killed my dad, you are killing him.
Now all you’ve done is killed two people. On purpose, on purpose, right? So, if it’s deeper, it’s that Chris walks into my dad’s store with a loaded gun, wanting to rob, and shoots and kills with intent. You drag him into a room with sedatives and other drugs to end his life. This is the intention. So nothing good will come of this.
This is one of the most extraordinary acts of forgiveness that this case, or perhaps any other case, has ever produced. And Mitesh says it directly, over and over again, to anyone who is willing to listen. The man on death row today is not the man who walked into my father’s store 14 years ago. With this support, Christopher’s legal team files a petition for clemency.
They teach transformation, mentoring, a youth curriculum, 12 inmate affidavits, and prison staff testimony. And at the center of this is the voice of Mitesh Patel, asking the council to hear what his own father might want. Christopher Young sits across the table at the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole on July 16, 2018.
His hands are on the table. His voice doesn’t tremble. He talks about the boy he was before all this . About his murdered father, about the gang that filled the silence after that, about the violence he endured for years and eventually unleashed on people who didn’t deserve it for a second. He doesn’t belittle Daphne Edwards.
He doesn’t belittle Challa Riley. He does not minimize what he did to Hasmukh Patel, to Patel’s family, to his own daughters, to everyone affected by his choice. And then he puts the name of Thomas Bart Whitaker at the center of his legal dispute. Whitaker is a white man from Sugar Land, Texas. In 2003, he sat down and methodically planned the murder of his entire family, his mother, his father, his brother, in order to get his inheritance.
He hired someone to pull the trigger. His mother and brother were shot dead in their own home. His father was also shot and survived. Whittaker was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. He spent years on death row. In February 2018, 5 months before Christopher Young’s scheduled execution, the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole voted to recommend that Whittaker’s death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.
The recommendation was built almost entirely on a plea for clemency for Whittaker’s own father, the very man Whittaker had hired someone to kill. Governor Greg Abbott accepted it. Whittaker walked off death row. He will never be free again, but he will live his life. Now look at these two cases side by side for a second.
Thomas Whittaker sat in a room and planned the murder of three members of his family. He paid someone else to pull the trigger. His mother and brother died. His own father, the man whose forgiveness saved Whitaker’s life, took a bullet from someone his son hired. This is cold-blooded. It’s calculated that Christopher Young’s crime, born of addiction, a never-ending cycle of trauma, and a morning soaked in alcohol and cocaine, simply wasn’t like that.
Christopher once killed in chaos, in a state that his own history can at least partially explain, even if it can never justify him. He never denied what he did. He spent 12 years doing the kind of inner work that most free people never do in their entire lives. Thomas Whitaker planned three murders and is alive today.
Christopher Young did one thing and is about to die. One person is white. One person is black. Christopher’s attorney, David Doe, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in the final days before his execution and made this clear. Race seems to be a driving force in this case. ” The state resisted, arguing that the cases were not comparable, that Young’s plea was weaker, that his previous experience and the rape of Daphne Edwards made him a much less likable candidate for clemency.
And this part is true. It is also true that Daphne Edwards was never a secret hidden in his clemency petition. This was in the court record from the very beginning. The board weighed all of this and still decided to keep Thomas Whitaker, a man whose crime was more calculated, more premeditated, and affected a greater number of victims.
The board looks at Christopher Young across the table, and the chairman makes a decision without apparent hesitation. Unanimously. Without mitigation of punishment. He will die tomorrow. That same day, returning to Polunsky, his three daughters come to him. The eldest is 17, the two youngest are 13. The visiting room is bright, almost brutal, considering what goes on inside.
No glass this time. He can hold their hands. He feels how much they have grown into themselves, these girls whom he has loved imperfectly and mostly from afar for most of …” their lives. He speaks calmly. He needs them to leave this room carrying something they might actually need, not just grief. Be better than me.
Stay off the streets. Use every gift you have been given. Don’t let this world decide who you are before you get a chance to figure it out for yourself. They don’t fall apart. They hold his hands and remember him in this light. And when the visit ends, they leave, carrying everything he gave them and everything he took from them, at the same time.
That evening he is offered his last meal. He doesn’t ask for anything special, a standard prison tray, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, corn, a slice of bread. He eats slowly, like a human, when with each bite there is one less. He spends the night writing letters to his daughters, to Mitesh Patel, to the young men he mentored and whom he will never see again.
His cell remains lit long after the rest of the block has gone dark. He prays. He sits with everything he has done, and everything he has tried to become, and everything he is going to do. to leave something unfinished behind. On the morning of July 17, 2018, he was transferred to Walls Death Row in Huntsville, where executions have been carried out in Texas for generations.
The road to death row is not long, but the sound of the chains stretches out until it seems like kilometers. Witnesses gather on the other side of the glass, journalists, government officials. Mitesh Patel and his family chose not to attend. They said everything they came for, but it wasn’t enough. Christopher is tied to a gurney , shackles are on his wrists, chest, and ankles.
A drip was inserted into the arm. He turned his head, as far as his shackles would allow , toward the witness window, and spoke. He says he didn’t understand death row when he first arrived here. He says that this needs to be talked about, that no one is having this conversation with children, but someone should.
He asks that the children who look up to him be told what is happening to him. He asks the young people he has mentored to continue without him. And then, speaking directly to the Patel family, even though they’re not in the room to hear this , I want to make sure the Patel family knows that I love them just as much as they love me.
To make sure that the children of the world know that I will be executed, and that those children I mentor continue this fight. “At 6:13 p.m., the drugs enter the queue. A few seconds pass.” ” I can taste them in my throat,” he says. — It’s burning. —His eyes remain open, staring at the ceiling. Then they will close. His chest rises slowly again , then stops rising. At 6:39 p.m.
on July 17, 2018, the warden’s voice fills the cell. The sentence has been carried out. “Here’s what I don’t want you to lose in all of this. Daphne Edwards woke up on Sunday morning to buy a pack of cigarettes and returned home, where her life was raped in front of her own daughters. Challa Riley was 8 months pregnant and still felt his fists on her the night before he killed the stranger.
Hasmukh Patel went to work, as he had every morning of his adult life, and never made it home to his wife and two children. These are not footnotes in Christopher Young’s story of redemption. This is history. He is not a hero who got an unfair deal from the system. He is a man who has caused real, documented, irreversible harm to real people.
And then, over the next 12 years, she became a person capable of understanding exactly what he had done. And that’s what makes this thing so difficult to accept. Because there is a temptation to choose a side. Or was he a monster who deserved exactly what he got, period , end of story. Or was he a victim of his circumstances who changed himself, and Texas killed him anyway only because of c
ruelty and…” racial bias . Both of these versions are easier said than done. The truth is that Christopher Young was a truly dangerous man until he was 21. Not because he was born that way, but because the 8-year-old boy was never given one after his father died on the street. No one intervened. No one caught him.
And a child who experiences that kind of pain, with that little guidance, will almost always find that version of power waiting for them, whether it’s a gang, a bottle, or a gun. That doesn’t make what he did to Daphne Edwards, T’Challa Riley, or Hasmukh Patel any less his own choice. He pulled the trigger . He laid his hands on the pregnant woman .
He raped the mother in front of her children and kissed them goodbye as he walked out the door. These were his actions, committed by an adult capable of understanding exactly what he was doing, even in the fog of that morning. But it’s also true that he changed, truly , authentically, over the years, to the point that 12 cellmates were willing to write their names in a way that would convince the son of the man he killed to stand in front of the cells and beg for salvation.
This transformation is real, and it still hasn’t erased what came before it. This is the part that doesn’t solve the problem. A person can become someone worth knowing and still have a debt for who they once were that no transformation can repay. Atonement and responsibility are not the same currency, and this is where a person actually finds one without ever being able to redeem the other.
So when Christopher Young looked at that parole board and asked why Thomas Whitaker survived, I understood the question. I understand why his lawyer filed this lawsuit, why the racial disparity in this comparison is truly inconvenient to directly observe. The man who cold-bloodedly planned the murder of his entire family is alive today.
A man who killed once in chaos after 12 years of documented transformation, no. This gap deserves close attention, and it deserves it regardless of how you feel about Christopher Young as a person. But I don’t think the answer to this injustice is that ” Then no one should have …” was executed. “And I don’t think that’s the case.
” Then the system made the right choice by killing him. ” or”. I think the honest answer is that both of these men did something that no amount of change should ever fully fix, and the state chose to show mercy to one of them over the other. And this inconsistency is a separate offense standing alongside his.
His three daughters grew up without a father, just like him. This is not a coincidence, and this is not poetry. It’s just what happens when no one stops the cycle in time, and then the state stops it in the only way it knows how, which doesn’t actually stop it. She simply transfers the loss to the next generation. So, here’s what I’m going to tell you, and I mean it honestly, not as a rhetorical device.
Christopher Young was guilty. He deserved severe punishment for what he did to Daphne Edwards, Challa Riley, and Hasmukh Patel. I do n’t think there’s a strong argument against this, and I’m not going to pretend there is, just to make this story cleaner. The question that really matters is whether the man Texas executed on J
uly…the 17th, 2018, was the same man who committed these crimes 14 years ago. And if he was no longer there , should this count as more than just a note in his pardon case? Does transformation ever deserve a second look? Is a death sentence a debt that remains the same from the moment it is passed, regardless of who is standing by to pay it years later? And if Thomas Whitaker’s father’s forgiveness was enough to save his son’s life, why wasn’t Hasmukh Patel’s son’s forgiveness enough to save Christopher’s life? I don’t have a clear answer for you
. I’m not sure that one exists. Tell me what you come up with in the comments. Not whether he was guilty, because he was, but whether the man who died on that gurney should have been treated as the same man who walked into that store in 2004, or someone the system had already lost the right to kill. And if you’re new here, welcome to True Crime Matter.
We thoroughly investigate each case and don’t take our eyes off the parts that don’t. decide carefully. Subscribe, turn on notifications , and see you next time.
