The British wife of a US death row murderer screamed ‘I love you’ and threw herself against the window of his execution chamber as she watched him die in front of her.
James Broadnax, 37, was pronounced dead on Thursday evening after receiving a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, about 70 miles north of Houston.
He was condemned for the 2008 shooting deaths of two men outside a suburban Dallas music studio.
Prosecutors say Broadnax and his cousin, Demarius Cummings, fatally shot and robbed Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler in the parking lot of Butler’s recording studio in Garland. Cummings was sentenced to life without parole.
Broadnax was defiant in a final statement in which he also sought forgiveness from the victims’ relatives. Seven relatives, including parents of each of the victims, were present.
‘I prayed to God for your forgiveness,’ he said, when asked by the warden if he had a final statement. ‘Despite what you think about me, I hope to God that prayer was answered. But no matter what you think about me, Texas got it wrong. I’m innocent, the facts of my case should speak for itself. Period,’ he said.
The execution was punctuated by screams of ‘I love you’ from his British wife Tiana Krasniqi, a 31-year-old from Lewisham in southeast London.
She was emotional at times during the procedure, throwing herself up to the death chamber window with arms spread, and had to be helped out of the prison.
In a post to her TikTok following her husband’s execution, Tiana wrote: ‘They killed my husband.
‘My husband suffered so bad from the lethal injection that he had a nose bleed and bruising on his neck. The families laughed as they watched. Is that justice?’
Just days before he was executed, Broadnax married Tiana, a law school graduate and mother-of-one, in a ceremony at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Texas.
The pair met in 2024 after she began researching racial disparities across the US justice system as part of her Master’s degree in International Human Rights at the University of Law.
After reaching out to Broadnax for her research, the pair quickly struck up a romance via email, then speaking ‘six to seven hours a day’ which deepened their connection.
James Broadnax (pictured, right) was pronounced dead on Thursday evening after receiving a lethal injection in front of his British wife Tiana Krasniqi (pictured, left)
Broadnax was executed for the 2008 shooting deaths of two men outside a suburban Dallas music studio
In a TikTok posted a day before his execution, a tearful Tiana said: ‘Let me make myself very, very clear. I’m not gonna stop here. It’s eight o’clock. They just locked his phone, and this might be the last night I speak to him.’
She said over and over: ‘Take me. Don’t take him.’
Tiana travelled to Texas for the first time last year to meet him face-to-face.
They spent 90 days with each other before getting married.
Speaking to ITV’s This Morning earlier this month, she admitted their wedding ceremony was ‘not the most romantic.’
Tiana said: ‘It’s behind glass… Texas have a very strict rule about no contact with death row inmates.
‘It’s a very quick 20-minute ceremony, you have an officiant, you say your vows and that’s it and it’s time to go.’
She said she had ‘no support’ from her loved ones, adding: ‘Nobody is happy, it’s not your typical, conventional relationship, there’s not been any support.
‘It’s fine, I completely understand and I’m not going to hold any grudges but at the same time, people have been to prison and come out and have become better people… if it happened, God willing, that he got to come out I can imagine the same thing happening and he could change his life as he plans to do.
‘Nobody is going to understand it, but it’s okay.’
The pair met in 2024 after she began researching racial disparities across the US justice system as part of her Master’s degree in International Human Rights
Speaking to ITV’s This Morning earlier this month, she admitted the wedding ceremony was ‘not the most romantic’
As the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began, Broadnax urged his supporters to keep fighting. ‘Don’t give up,’ he said, and was stopped in another mid-sentence by a gasp. He shook his head briefly and all movement stopped. He was pronounced dead 21 minutes later, at 6.47pm CDT.
In the weeks before his execution, Tiana fought to get her husband’s death sentence overturned.
She claimed that police and prosecutors did not follow proper procedure during the investigation and prosecution of the case.
She said: ‘He was under the influence of PCP (Phencyclidine) when he was interviewed, he had only been interviewed four hours after the arrest and he had made clear to the police he was high.
‘They did put five interviewers in front of him and he took the blame for something that he didn’t do, and he acted in a way that showed he was under the influence.
‘They had excluded all African American jurors from the case until the last minute… they only added one, and within that time, there was the questioning of the jurors, and it wasn’t the most racially neutral.’
During the trial, the prosecution presented the jury with a selection of rap lyrics that alluded to murder, robbery and drugs, to make the case for the death sentence.
Broadnax’s attorneys had argued in an earlier appeal that prosecutors had violated his constitutional rights by using some of the rap lyrics he wrote to portray him as a violent and dangerous person in order to secure a death sentence.
In the weeks before his execution, Tiana fought to get her husband’s death sentence overturned
Tiana travelled to Texas for the first time last year to meet him face-to-face
‘He also had a bout 40 pages of rap lyrics, and when it came to the guilty verdict, the jurors had asked to see the rap lyrics twice before they made a decision to see if he was of future dangerousness,’ Tiana added.
‘They tried to make him out as a psychopath but nobody ever evaluated him directly.
A number of A-list rappers, including Travis Scott, T.I. and Killer Mike, had filed briefs at the Supreme Court in support of Broadnax’s appeal.
Prior to his execution, and still coming to terms that Broadnax might still face the death penalty, Tiana concluded: ‘It’s been a process, it’s been a lot of conversations, a lot of prayer, you still have hope because the evidence is so overwhelming that he didn’t commit the crime.
‘You’d hope that people do stand up and fight for somebody that didn’t do the crime.’
Prosecutors said Broadnax confessed to the shooting, telling reporters during jailhouse interviews that ‘I pulled the trigger’ and that he had no remorse.
His lawyers had focused his final appeals on two issues: Cummings had recently confessed to being the shooter; and Broadnax’s constitutional rights were violated because prosecutors eliminated potential jurors during his trial on the basis of race.
‘I’m really gonna tell it like it’s supposed to be told, that it was me, that I was the killer. I shot Matthew… [and] Steve Swan,’ Cummings said recently from prison in a video created as part of the efforts to stop Broadnax’s execution.
His attorneys also alleged prosecutors dismissed all seven potential Black jurors on the basis of their race, ‘utilising a spreadsheet during jury selection that [highlighted] only the names of every Black juror,’ according to court documents. One Black juror was later reinstated to the jury. Broadnax was Black.
In a 1986 ruling known as Batson v. Kentucky, the US Supreme Court determined that excluding jurors because of their race violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Theresa Butler, Matthew Butler’s mother, had asked that the execution proceed.
‘This so called confession from Cummings is just a stall tactic by Broadnax’s desperate defence team. It’s all a lie,’ Butler wrote in a post on social media.
Broadnax was the third person put to death this year in Texas and the 10th in the country. Texas has historically held more executions than any other state.
Earlier on Thursday, the US Supreme Court denied a request by Broadnax’s attorneys to stop his execution.
