Shocking, I know, from such a moral paragon.
A week after death row inmate Robert Roberson was set to die, the extraordinary quest to save his life has morphed into a deepening political battle between Texas House lawmakers and the state’s leading Republicans as they trade bitter accusations and push conflicting narratives around his guilt — or likely innocence.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday condemned the bipartisan Texas House committee that forced a delay of Roberson’s execution, saying it “stepped out of line.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a graphic press release 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 Moody, D-El Paso, along 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 release, including citations and exhibits shown at trial and since recovered during the appeals process.
The Office of the Attorney General attached the autopsy report of Roberson’s 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, whom he was convicted of killing, and a statement from the medical examiner who performed it. But Paxton otherwise referred broadly to the trial record and did not acknowledge any of the new evidence presented 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 argument to carry on with Roberson’s death sentence as pushed by Paxton, the state’s top law enforcement officer, relied on a sometimes misleading and incomplete summation of his trial — itself, Roberson’s advocates say, tainted by a discredited shaken baby diagnosis, incomplete medical records, uncorroborated and prejudicial allegations of sexual abuse, bias against a man with undiagnosed autism, and non-credible testimony about Roberson’s history.
Roberson’s supporters point to reams of new scientific and medical evidence that suggest Nikki died from undiagnosed pneumonia, which suppressed her breathing and was worsened by medications that are no longer prescribed to children, leading to bleeding and swelling in her brain.
The lawmakers in Thursday’s rebuttal refuted Paxton’s claims that Nikki had extensive bruising when Roberson brought her to the hospital, and that she died not only from being violently shaken, but also from “blunt force head injuries” caused by beating.
The autopsy photos, they said, show “almost no outward injuries” — a fact the state acknowledged at trial when asking the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy to explain the “large discrepancy” between “what you see on the outside and what you see on the inside.” The lack of external injuries, in fact, is what led a doctor to diagnose shaken baby syndrome, the lawmakers wrote.
In response to Paxton’s claim that Roberson had a history of violence and domestic abuse, the lawmakers argued that the witnesses who gave that testimony at trial had serious credibility issues and provided no corroborating evidence.
They also condemned Paxton’s reference to another inmate’s claim that Roberson had admitted to molesting his daughter — a report so dubious that even the prosecution did not include 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 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 another shaken baby conviction out of Dallas County this month.
Roberson’s attorneys issued their own 27-page rebuttal Thursday in response to Paxton’s release.
See here for some background. There’s a long and well-documented history of Ken Paxton just flat lying about stuff – he’s still fighting a State Bar discipline hearing because of his lies in litigation to overturn the 2020 election – and the list of times when he was, let’s say casual about the truth is even longer. Some of the people responding to this have been clear about what Ken Paxton is for a long time, others are chiming in because this time he’s lying about something they care about. I would tell those folks that you can’t trust a liar and should not let liars gain and hold power, which perhaps is some advice they could apply to both the current election and the one in 2026. Be that as it may, this is where we are. I don’t know how this resolves, but I do know what the right course of action is.
The death penalty is one issue where I did a 180. There are without a doubt bad people who do heinous things and are a legit danger to society. I have no moral qualms about treating them as one would a rabid dog. My moral qualm is that the state isn’t even trying that hard to get the verdict right in so many cases. I would rather give the worst criminals life without parole than execute an innocent person. Anyone complaining about “3 hots and a cot” hasn’t put any serious thought into how awful living with such a loss of freedom is. Some would claim it’s even crueler than death and there’s validity to that argument.
I don’t know all the details of this case, but there’s enough doubt that the right thing to do is to reexamine this conviction.