A Texas man accused of killing a 7-year-old girl after striking her with his delivery truck is now headed toward a death penalty trial — and the legal battle over whether he should be eligible for execution has already begun.
Tanner Horner, a 34-year-old FedEx driver, is charged with the capital murder and aggravated kidnapping of Athena Strand, a second-grader from Wise County, Texas, who was killed in December 2022. Prosecutors say Horner accidentally hit the girl with his truck in her family’s driveway, then panicked — and instead of calling for help, he abducted her, placed her in his van, and strangled her. The case shocked the state and drew national attention almost immediately. Now, as the legal machinery grinds forward, it’s raising a question that courts have wrestled with for years: when does a defendant’s mental condition change what justice looks like?
The Charges and the Push for Death
Horner was indicted on February 16, 2023, on two counts: aggravated kidnapping and capital murder of a person under the age of 10. That last charge carries particular weight in Texas, where killing a child under 10 is among the most serious offenses the state recognizes. Wise County District Attorney James Stainton made clear from the outset that his office would seek the death penalty. Prosecutors in Tarrant County, where the trial is being held after a venue change, have echoed that intent.
The facts alleged, if proven, are brutal in their simplicity. A child was in her own driveway. A delivery driver made a terrible mistake. And then, according to investigators, he made it infinitely worse.
The Defense’s Argument: Autism and the Death Penalty
But it’s not that simple — at least not according to Horner’s attorneys. Defense lawyers have argued that Horner has been diagnosed with autism, a condition they say reduces his moral culpability to a degree that should bar the state from executing him. The motions his legal team filed lean on an evolving — and still deeply contested — area of constitutional law.
The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that executing individuals with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Autism, however, is a different and more complex diagnosis. It isn’t classified as an intellectual disability, and courts have not uniformly extended those same protections to people on the autism spectrum. That’s the crux of the defense’s uphill climb here: they’re asking the court to treat Horner’s condition as functionally equivalent to something the law already protects — and that’s a hard argument to make, even in sympathetic circumstances.
What’s at Stake
The charges against Horner — capital murder of a person under 10 and aggravated kidnapping — represent two of the most serious counts in the Texas penal code. A conviction on the capital murder charge alone could send him to death row. Texas, it bears noting, executes more prisoners than any other state in the country. This is not an abstract legal exercise.
Still, the autism argument isn’t going away. Defense teams across the country have increasingly raised neurodevelopmental diagnoses in capital cases, with mixed results. Some courts have shown a willingness to consider the diminished social awareness and impulse-regulation difficulties associated with autism as mitigating factors during sentencing. Others haven’t. Where a Texas court lands on that question — if it gets that far — could matter well beyond this single case.
For Athena Strand’s family, of course, the legal nuances must feel like a different world entirely. A little girl went outside one afternoon in December and never came back. Whatever a jury ultimately decides about Tanner Horner’s fate, that fact doesn’t change.
