As Hurricane Harvey approached Texas, state prison officials moved thousands of inmates to higher ground. But now that the storm has passed, about 600 of the evacuees gained protection from hot conditions in their cells thanks to an ongoing federal lawsuit.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, an Austin Democrat, is asking about prisoner safety in Beaumont after Hurricane Harvey. Inmates stayed put at state and federal prisons while the city lost its water supply for about a week.

Texas law enforcement officers and other first responders are shipping out to the Houston area to help local authorities in rescue and security efforts, thanks in part to a statewide aid system.

Hurricane Harvey has delayed the execution of a San Antonio man. Bexar County officials withdrew the execution date because part of the man's defense team works in the Houston area.

Two more Houston-area prisons have been evacuated as flooding continues, bringing the total to five prisons and almost 6,000 inmates shipped off to drier facilities in the region. 

Texas' two biggest city police departments are losing officers because of troubled pension funds and low pay. The shrinking ranks have paired with rising violent crime rates, longer call response times and fewer solved crimes. 

A man convicted in the sexual assault and murder of an 11-year-old girl was set to die next Wednesday. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stopped his execution amid claims of intellectual disability. 

Bernie Tiede, the East Texas mortician-turned-murderer whose crime prompted a Hollywood movie, lost one round of his appeals Thursday.

A federal judge signed off on Texas' proposal to temporarily move more than 1,000 inmates from one hot prison to 11 different facilities around the state.

Texas submitted a court-ordered proposal Thursday to move about 1,000 medically sensitive inmates from an uncooled prison southeast of College Station to air-conditioned units elsewhere in the state.

Gov. Greg Abbott asked the Texas Department of Public Safety Friday to retract its plans to begin charging local agencies for forensic testing.

Texas carried out its fifth execution of the year Thursday evening, putting to death TaiChin Preyor in the 2004 murder of a San Antonio woman.

Eight doses of the state's supply of pentobarbital, the only drug used in Texas executions, expired on Thursday, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

With two days left before TaiChin Preyor's scheduled execution, his lawyers have tried just about everything to stop it. That includes alleging that his previous counsel committed fraud.

Most Texas prisons remain un-air conditioned, but a federal judge's ruling Wednesday called conditions at one prison cruel and unusual and ordered temporary air conditioning for heat-sensitive inmates.