News Summary

• Tanner Horner, 34, was sentenced to die by lethal injection for the murder of 7-year-old Athena Strand in November 2022.
• Horner will spend the rest of his life at the Polunsky Unit, an infamously restrictive prison outside Houston where the state's death row inmates spend at least 22 hours a day in their 60-square-foot cells.
• He will be subjected to constant surveillance, with hourly checks that continue through the night that will prevent him from getting continuous sleep.
• He'll eat his meals in the cell, and he'll have access to no entertainment beyond reading materials and a pen and paper to write with.
• A group of inmates called the prison’s solitary confinement policy a ‘psychologically and physically damaging practice’ in a 2023 lawsuit that alleged their constitutional rights had been violated by the conditions.