AUSTIN, Texas — Texas lawmakers tried again but failed Friday to bring a man on death row to the state Capitol because they don’t believe he killed his 2-year-old daughter. This makes it less likely that Robert Roberson will speak in public after a last-minute subpoena stopped his execution.
Roberson was supposed to be put to death by lethal injection in October. He would be the first person in the U.S. to be put to death because of a sentence related to shaken baby syndrome, a diagnosis that medical experts have called into question.
The most recent attempt to get Roberson to appear failed after Texas’ attorney general asked a court to stop a second legislative subpoena. Lawmakers are running out of time until the Legislature meets again in January, at which point the subpoena will no longer be valid.
Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody, who led the effort to stop Roberson’s execution, said, “They have never responded to anything meaningful because they don’t want to have Robert here.”
Roberson, who is 58 years old, was found guilty of killing his daughter in 2003. Prosecutors said he fiercely shook his daughter back and forth, which is known as “shaken baby syndrome,” and hurt her head badly.
A group of politicians from both parties, civil rights activists, and medical experts have questioned the “shaken baby” diagnosis that was used to convict Roberson. They say that his daughter probably died from severe pneumonia.
For Roberson’s conviction, the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, has strongly supported it and said that the science behind shaken baby syndrome has not changed enough to clear him of guilt.
Paxton’s office said in the court order that “it is not the role of the Legislature to adjudicate offenses” and that lawmakers went too far when they stopped his execution.
The Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence sent Roberson their first subpoena to appear just one day before he was supposed to be put to death. This was an unusual legal move that stopped his execution.
There has been no change to the date of killing.
Texas has a “junk science law” that lets people whose convictions were based on questionable science get their sentences thrown out. The committee in the House said they wanted Roberson to talk about this law and how they don’t think it has worked for him. Supporters of criminal justice say that the state’s top criminal court has purposely read the law wrong.
In November, the Texas Supreme Court said that the order was legal, but it could not be used to get around a planned execution.
Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has said that Roberson was rightly convicted. It was a unanimous decision by the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole in October not to suggest clemency for him.
Source: Texas man whose execution was halted in shaken baby case is again stopped from testifying