The legal battle continues over Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson and a subpoena requiring him to testify before the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton prevents Roberson from testifying in person. It is not known if and when he will testify. However, this quote is why Roberson is still alive today. It also raised the question: Are Texas courts ignoring evidence of Roberson’s innocence?

On Oct. 17, outside the Walls Correctional Facility in Huntsville, anti-death penalty protesters rallied 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.

The news media broadcasting live from the scene was set up to cover the biggest story in Texas and what could have been Roberson’s final hours.

Executions in Texas typically get little media attention. But that changed when a bipartisan group of state lawmakers said Roberson is likely innocent of killing his two-year-old daughter, Nikki.

Prosecutors said Nikki died of shaken baby syndrome. Experts say it’s more likely he died of pneumonia, and Roberson is innocent. But Texas was determined to execute him anyway.

The courts refused to hear new exculpatory evidence. Governor Abbott refused to grant 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 that they take a tough stance on sentencing,” said Sam Bassett, an Austin criminal defense attorney. He said their argument is that the judiciary needs finality when a sentence is handed down, but, he said, the death penalty should meet the highest standard.

“I think the death penalty is the ultimate punishment, the ultimate punishment. And it is irreversible once achieved. And you can’t say “oops, I was wrong” later. The person is 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 that Abbott, Paxton and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals do not hold the death penalty to a high standard at all.

“Robert Roberson’s case exposes everything that is wrong with the death penalty system in Texas,” Cuellar said.

And she added that there are more problems with Roberson’s case. “And that includes grossly incompetent legal representation during his trial in 2003. (There has been) a rigid and indifferent judiciary that has so far refused to review the overwhelming scientific evidence of his innocence, despite a Texas law created precisely to do this It also includes a parole and pardon board that operates without transparency,” Cuellar said.

Cuellar said there are so many troubling questions about the 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 have been executed despite strong claims of innocence,” she said.

But the Texas Politics Project’s Jim Henson poll says many Texans don’t mind that.

“One of the things we did periodically was ask people directly, ‘How often do you think people are wrongfully convicted of capital crimes in the state of Texas?’ And what we found is that only 28% say “never” or “almost never,” but also only 14% say “a lot of the time.” The plurality — about half (or) 46 percent — say ‘occasionally’ — that it happens occasionally,” Henson said.

Henson found that despite about half of Texans saying Texas sometimes executes innocent people, they still largely favor capital punishment, although support for the death penalty has slipped in recent years.

“Support for the death penalty began to rise slightly in the early twenties from about 63 percent in mid-2021 to 69 percent again in December 2023,” he said.

Henson didn’t believe the Roberson cover-up would change the minds of Texans, despite claims that that state was willing to kill a presumably innocent man.

He said it was a single news event in a noisy media environment with most of the 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 death penalty in Texas.

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