Att. Gen. Ken Paxton has successfully blocked an attempt to have the Texas Supreme Court derail the court-ordered execution of convicted child murderer Robert Roberson.
“Attorney General Ken Paxton successfully stopped an attempt by activists and a handful of State legislators to create a precedent allowing for a legislative committee to delay an execution, settling a critical Constitutional question and ensuring justice for the two-year-old murder victim in the 2002 case,” per the Texas Attorney General’s press release.
“Robert Roberson was convicted of murdering his two-year-old daughter in 2002 and scheduled to be executed in October 2024. In an unprecedented procedural maneuver intended to end-run the State Constitution and delay his execution, members of the Texas House issued a subpoena calling the convicted murderer to testify in front of their committee on a date after the execution was to take place. The legislative committee then sued to enforce their subpoena, doubling down on their unconstitutional effort to interfere with his death sentence. Now, the Texas Supreme Court has ruled that the subpoena issued by a Texas House Committee may not interfere with a lawfully ordered execution, writing, ‘Legislative investigatory power, even at its maximum, is insufficient to forestall a long-scheduled execution under the circumstances presented here,'” the press release continued.
As reported by The Dallas Express, Roberson’s defense team and some members of the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence have previously fiercely rebutted Paxton’s statements, arguing that they misrepresented the Roberson case.
However, not all Texas House of Representatives members have supported Roberson.
In October, eight members of the Texas House submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Texas Supreme Court in support of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
The brief stated that the members of the House Committee “waging this campaign on behalf of a child murderer do not speak for the entire Texas House of Representatives.”
Gov. Greg Abbott, who has the authority to grant clemency for all of Roberson’s appeals, also submitted an amicus curiae brief, in which he stated that the House committee “stepped out of line” by using a subpoena to disrupt the execution, which had been scheduled for October.