Hours Before His Lethal Injection, His 8-Year-Old Daughter Said One Sentence That Stopped the Execution

In the final hours before a scheduled lethal injection, Daniel Foster had only one request left—one that prison officials rarely granted.

“Let me see my daughter,” he said, voice raw from years of pleading behind concrete walls. “Just once. I haven’t held Emily in three years.”

Daniel had spent five years on death row in Texas for the brutal murder of his wife, Laura. The case had been sold to the public as “open and shut”: fingerprints on a weapon, blood on his clothes, and a neighbor who claimed to have seen him leaving the house that night.

But even after overseeing more executions than he liked to count, Warden Robert Mitchell couldn’t shake a simple thought: Daniel didn’t look like a guilty man.