From Texas Public Radio:
The legal standoff continues over Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson and a subpoena calling for him to testify before the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is blocking Roberson from testifying in person. There’s no telling if and when he will testify. Nevertheless, that subpoena is why Roberson is still alive today. It also elevated the question: Are Texas courts ignoring Roberson’s evidence of innocence?
On October 17, outside the Walls Prison Unit in Huntsville, protestors against the death penalty raged against the pending execution of Robert Roberson. They gather there every time there is an execution, but this time they had a much larger audience.
News media broadcasting live from the scene were set up to cover the biggest story in Texas and what might have been Roberson’s final hours.
Executions in Texas usually draw little media attention. But that changed when a bipartisan group of state lawmakers said Roberson was likely innocent of murdering his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki.
Prosecutors had said Nikki died from the debunked shaken baby syndrome. Experts say it’s more likely she died from pneumonia, and Roberson is innocent. But Texas was determined to execute him anyway.
The courts declined to hear new exonerating evidence. Governor Abbott refused to give Roberson a 30-day reprieve. And Attorney General Paxton fought to have Roberson executed despite the subpoena.
“Well, it’s very consistent in my experience with governors and attorneys general in that they take a harsh stance toward carrying out sentences,” said Sam Bassett, an Austin-based criminal defense attorney. He said their argument is that the judicial system needs finality when a sentence is pronounced, but, he said, the death penalty should meet the highest standard.
“I think the death penalty is the ultimate sanction, ultimate punishment. And it’s irreversible once it’s carried out. And you can’t later on say, ‘oops, we got that wrong.’ The person’s already in the grave,” he said.
Kristin Houle Cuellar is the executive director of the Texas Coalition to abolish the Death Penalty. She said it’s clear Abbott, Paxton and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals are not holding the death penalty to a high standard at all.
“The case of Robert Roberson lays bare everything that is wrong with the Texas death penalty system,” Cuellar said
And she added that there are multiple problems with Roberson’s case. “And that includes grossly incompetent legal representation during his trial back in 2003. [There was] a rigid and indifferent judiciary that so far has refused to review the overwhelming scientific evidence of his innocence despite a Texas law created to do exactly that. It also includes a board of pardons and paroles that acts without transparency,” Cuellar said.
Cuellar said there are so many troubling questions about this case that it should cause every Texan to reexamine how they feel about the death penalty.
“We know for a fact that innocent people have been sentenced to death in this state and we also have significant evidence of people who were executed despite strong innocence claims,” she said.
But pollster Jim Henson of the Texas Politics Project says many Texans don’t mind that.
“One of the things that we’ve done periodically was to ask people directly, ‘How often do you think people are wrongly convicted of death penalty offenses in the state of Texas?’ And what we’ve found is that only 28% say ‘never’ or ‘almost never’ but also, only 14% say ‘a great deal of the time’. The plurality— about half [or] 46% —say ‘occasionally’— that it does occasionally happen,” Henson said.
Henson found that despite about half of Texans saying that on occasion Texas executes innocent people, they are still largely in favor of capital punishment, although support for the death penalty has wavered in recent years.
“Support for the death penalty began to rise a little bit in the early twenties from about 63% in mid 2021 up to 69% again in December of 2023,” he said.
Henson didn’t think the coverage of Roberson would change Texans’ opinions despite assertions that that state was willing to kill a likely innocent man.
He said it’s a single news event in a noisy media environment with most attention focused on the election. For public opinion to change, there would need to be more Robert Robersons and more big questions about the fairness of the Texas death penalty.
