Horner death sentence remains under automatic review after June new-trial motion

Tanner Lynn Horner's death sentence is still moving through the automatic review that Texas law requires of a capital murder judgment when the punishment is death, and the motion for a new trial filed in his case on June 4 did not halt it, records at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals show. The same records place the crime in Paradise, in Wise County, and the conviction proceedings in Tarrant County's 297th District Court, rather than in Cooke County.

The appellate court opened Horner's direct appeal on May 6 as case AP-77,133, styled Horner, Tanner Lynn v. State of Texas. Its docket lists a judgment or appealable order entered May 5 in Tarrant County trial court case 1844500, the new-trial motion filed a month later, and a September 2 deadline for the district clerk and the court reporter to file the trial records.

The Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure treat a criminal motion for new trial as denied if a judge does not rule on it by written order before the 75-day ruling period expires. Whether a judge signed such an order in Horner's case could not be confirmed from the appellate filings used for this report. The direct appeal is going forward regardless, and the September deadline for the records remains on the docket.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice lists Horner as a former FedEx driver sent to death row for an offense committed on November 30, 2022. The agency's death row summary describes a 7-year-old girl who was abducted in Paradise and strangled, and it does not name her. Horner's inmate record gives the offense as capital murder with death, the sentence date as May 5, 2026, and the sentencing county as Tarrant.

Article 37.071 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure sends a capital murder judgment carrying a death sentence to the Court of Criminal Appeals without the defendant having to ask. A second track is open as well. On May 11 the court docketed an application for a writ of habeas corpus under Article 11.071, numbered WR-97,630-01 and tied to the same Tarrant County case. Article 11.071 governs habeas applications in Texas death penalty cases.

Should the Court of Criminal Appeals enter a final judgment against Horner, federal law at 28 U.S.C. Section 1257 allows the United States Supreme Court to review final judgments from a state's highest court by writ of certiorari when a federal question is presented.

What jurors heard during the punishment phase cannot yet be measured against the official transcript. The reporter's record was not due until September 2, so accounts of testimony, exhibits and the length of deliberations sit outside the primary court file for now.