Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s remarks about the Robert Roberson death penalty case have been met with lengthy rebuttals from both the death row inmate’s defense team as well as from members of the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence.
The attorney general’s office issued a press release on Wednesday to purportedly ‘set the record straight’ about the death of Roberson’s two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis in 2002, for which Roberson was convicted of murder in 2003, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
In the statement, Paxton insisted that Roberson was guilty of murdering Nikki and he accused members of the House committee of engaging in “eleventh-hour, one-sided, extrajudicial stunts that attempt to obscure the facts and rewrite his past.”
Paxton referred only to the trial record and did not mention or acknowledge any of the new evidence presented during Roberson’s appeals.
On Thursday, Roberson’s defense team released a 27-page point-by-point rebuttal to the attorney general’s statements, focusing on 12 “gross misrepresentations” of Roberson’s case.
Later that same day, four members of the bipartisan Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence released a 16-page rebuttal to Paxton’s press release, criticizing the AG for publishing a “misleading and in large part simply untrue” summation of the case. The rebuttal document, which addressed Paxton’s assertions point-by-point and attempted to dismantle them, included citations and exhibits shown at trial and during the appeals process.
For instance, Paxton said the child had extensive bruising, but autopsy photos show “almost no outward injuries,” which the medical examiner acknowledged when asked to explain the “large discrepancy” between “what you see on the outside and what you see on the inside.” This lack of external injuries is what led the doctor to diagnose shaken baby syndrome, according to the committee’s rebuttal document.
Also, Paxton alleged that Roberson had a history of violence and sexual abuse, but that claim is based on testimony from witnesses who had serious credibility issues and no corroborating evidence was ever provided to back up the claim, the committee members wrote.
Some of Paxton’s fellow Republicans have taken issue with the attorney general’s statement.
Conservative activist and mega-donor Doug Deason posted on social media that the OAG’s statement “is completely unhinged from reality. Whoever wrote and released it should be evaluated for mental competence by the AG’s office.”
However, eight members of the Texas House submitted an amicus curiae in the Texas Supreme Court on Thursday in support of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, stating that the members of the House Committee “waging this campaign on a child-murderer’s behalf do not speak for the full Texas House of Representatives.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the only person in the state who has the power to grant clemency now that all of Roberson’s appeals have been exhausted, has not publicly commented on the Roberson case itself or expressed an opinion as to the convicted murderer’s guilt or innocence. He did, however, file an amicus curiae with the Texas Supreme Court in which he said the House committee “stepped out of line” by using a subpoena to disrupt Roberson’s scheduled execution last week.
“Unless the Court rejects that tactic, it can be repeated in every capital case, effectively rewriting the Constitution to reassign a power given only to the Governor,” Abbott’s general counsel wrote in the filing.
The subpoena was issued on October 17, just hours before Roberson’s scheduled execution, so that the death row inmate could testify about a “junk science” law, Article 11.073, at a committee hearing the following week. Roberson ultimately did not testify at the hearing because of a dispute between legislators and the state over whether he should testify in person or via video conferencing.