Michael Hall

The judge is one of the most brazenly partisan in the country—which just might earn him a spot on the high court.

Relax near Big Bend National Park in the cool waters at Terlingua Ranch Lodge, the only pool for miles around. 

Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s book chronicles the failures that led to Benjamine Spencer's conviction—and the ongoing fight to reverse it.

Cook, wrongfully convicted of murder, fought for decades to prove his innocence. On Wednesday, he found out from a hospital bed he had been exonerated.

Nobody could tell a story like Roxy Gordon. He would stay up all night on the porch of his house in East Dallas—this was in the eighties and nineties—surrounded by artists and musicians, spinning tales, singing songs, drinking vodka. Roxy, who wore his dark glasses even at night, had the charisma of a rock star, with long black hair spilling out of his cowboy hat, a coyote-tooth necklace, and a tattoo of an eagle on his left forearm. In his deep West Texas drawl, he would talk about growing up i…

Dang, but C. J. Stroud had a hell of a year on the football field. As the rookie quarterback for the Houston Texans, Stroud, who turned 22 in October, passed for 4,108 yards (third-most by a rookie ever), and led the league with a 23-to-5 touchdown-to-interception ratio—the youngest player ever to do that. In one game he threw for an astounding 470 yards and 5 touchdowns. Stroud was named AP’s NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year, the first Texans player ever to receive the award, and he led the tea…

Terry Allen likes to call himself an artist, full stop. The rest of us tend to complicate things. We like to call him a conceptual artist or a multimedia artist—or a singer-songwriter-playwright-sculptor-painter-pianist. We feel we have to, because he has played so many different roles in his life. Considered both a grandfather of alternative country music and a grand master of modern conceptual art, he’s written hundreds of songs and radio plays. His physical work sits in New York’s Museum of M…

Andrew Lichtenstein spent six years taking pictures inside Texas’ vast prison system. The result is an anthropological study of a brutal culture.

She never felt right about sending him to prison. Every year around Christmas, Estella Ybarra would find herself thinking back to December 1990 and that El Paso courtroom, where for three days she sat on a jury holding Carlos Jaile’s fate in her hands. From the start of the trial she’d been unimpressed by the evidence that he had raped an eight-year-old girl. The state’s case hinged on the victim’s identification of Jaile in a police lineup two years after the attack. The girl said her assailant…

Hector Polanco was a legend—in more ways than one. He joined the Austin Police Department in 1976 and spent years as a patrolman before becoming a homicide cop. Polanco was handsome and charismatic and often found himself in the pages of the Austin American-Statesman—nabbing bad guys, rescuing infants, and, in January 1978, five weeks after University of Texas running back Earl Campbell won the Heisman Trophy, writing him a warning ticket for speeding. By August 1991, Polanco had worked himself…