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Per week after dying row inmate Robert Roberson was set to die, the extraordinary quest to save lots of his life has morphed right into a deepening political battle between Texas Home lawmakers and the state’s main Republicans as they commerce bitter accusations and push conflicting narratives round his guilt — or seemingly innocence.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday condemned the bipartisan Texas Home committee that compelled a delay of Roberson’s execution, saying it “stepped out of line.”
Lawyer Common Ken Paxton, in a graphic press launch Wednesday, insisted on Roberson’s guilt and accused the committee of pursuing “eleventh-hour, one-sided, extrajudicial stunts that attempt to obscure the facts and rewrite his past.”
Lawmakers, in return, blasted Paxton for publishing a “misleading and in large part simply untrue” summation of Roberson’s case.
State Rep. Joe Tempery, D-El Paso, together with Reps. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, Rhetta Andrews Bowers, D-Rowlett, and Lacey Hull, R-Houston, issued a 16-page, point-by-point rebuttal on Thursday to Paxton’s launch, together with citations and reveals proven at trial and since recovered in the course of the appeals course of.
The Workplace of the Lawyer Common hooked up the post-mortem report of Roberson’s 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, whom he was convicted of killing, and a press release from the health worker who carried out it. However Paxton in any other case referred broadly to the trial report and didn’t acknowledge any of the brand new proof offered in Roberson’s appeals.
“There are no new facts in the OAG’s statement, only a collection of exaggerations, misrepresentations and full-on untruths completely divorced from fact and context,” Moody wrote on social media Thursday.
The political struggle over Roberson’s execution got here because of the weird switch in venue for debate over his case from the courtroom to the broader public discourse — a shift wrought when the courts shut down all of Roberson’s appeals and lawmakers, satisfied of his seemingly innocence or at the very least of a failure by the courts, turned to their bully pulpit to intervene.
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As a part of a uncommon marketing campaign to cease Roberson’s execution, the Texas Committee on Prison Jurisprudence held two, daylong hearings that includes a stream of consultants and advocates testifying stay to his innocence.
“These people believe Robert isn’t guilty,” Moody, Leach, Bowers and Hull wrote of their rebuttal. “These people know Robert didn’t get a fair trial.”
The conflict of narratives round Roberson’s guilt or innocence has since performed out within the public sphere — the Texas Capitol, social media and dueling press releases — turning each observer right into a quasi-juror, decide and potential executioner.
Paxton stepped in shortly after Roberson’s execution was halted to quash plans for Roberson to testify earlier than the Home felony jurisprudence committee in individual on the Capitol. His workplace mentioned Roberson would solely testify over video “in the interest of public safety,” to which Roberson’s legal professional and the committee objected.
Doug Deason, a GOP megadonor and Abbott ally, referred to as Paxton’s launch “completely unhinged from reality,” whereas former Texas Republican Occasion Chair Matt Rinaldi described the response to the discharge from Roberson’s legal professional as “gaslighting at its finest.”
Roberson was convicted of capital homicide in 2003 for the dying of his chronically unwell daughter. He has maintained his innocence over 20 years on dying row whereas looking for unsuccessfully to make use of Texas’ 2013 junk science regulation to argue that the shaken child syndrome prognosis on the crux of his conviction is scientifically unsound.
The Texas Supreme Court docket stopped Roberson’s execution on Oct. 17 after a subpoena issued by the Home panel touched off a separation of powers concern between the state’s legislative and govt branches. Roberson nonetheless faces the dying penalty, however his execution has been delayed pending the decision of that constitutional battle.
The argument to hold on with Roberson’s dying sentence as pushed by Paxton, the state’s high regulation enforcement officer, relied on a typically deceptive and incomplete summation of his trial — itself, Roberson’s advocates say, tainted by a discredited shaken child prognosis, incomplete medical information, uncorroborated and prejudicial allegations of sexual abuse, bias towards a person with undiagnosed autism, and non-credible testimony about Roberson’s historical past.
Roberson’s supporters level to reams of recent scientific and medical proof that counsel Nikki died from undiagnosed pneumonia, which suppressed her respiration and was worsened by medicines which are now not prescribed to youngsters, resulting in bleeding and swelling in her mind.
The lawmakers in Thursday’s rebuttal refuted Paxton’s claims that Nikki had intensive bruising when Roberson introduced her to the hospital, and that she died not solely from being violently shaken, but additionally from “blunt force head injuries” brought on by beating.
The post-mortem pictures, they mentioned, present “almost no outward injuries” — a reality the state acknowledged at trial when asking the health worker who performed the post-mortem to clarify the “large discrepancy” between “what you see on the outside and what you see on the inside.” The shortage of exterior accidents, actually, is what led a health care provider to diagnose shaken child syndrome, the lawmakers wrote.
In response to Paxton’s declare that Roberson had a historical past of violence and home abuse, the lawmakers argued that the witnesses who gave that testimony at trial had severe credibility points and offered no corroborating proof.
Additionally they condemned Paxton’s reference to a different inmate’s declare that Roberson had admitted to molesting his daughter — a report so doubtful that even the prosecution didn’t embrace it in its case.
“By including this information, the OAG has repeated a lie with, at best, a complete indifference to the truth,” the lawmakers wrote. “The ‘jailhouse snitch’ here wove a tale so outrageously contrary to the evidence that prosecutors didn’t use it at trial.”
And so they highlighted the “mountain of evidence and changed science that’s accumulated since Robert’s trial — the same changed science that caused the Court of Criminal Appeals” to overturn one other shaken child conviction out of Dallas County this month.
Roberson’s attorneys issued their very own 27-page rebuttal Thursday in response to Paxton’s launch.
“We know that the laws our Legislature created to correct those problems haven’t worked as intended for Robert and people like him,” the lawmakers wrote.” That’s why we’re right here and why we gained’t give up.”
