A Texas Home Committee was left with out its key witness on Friday after Legal professional Normal Ken Paxton filed a movement late Thursday barring demise row inmate Robert Roberson from testifying on the Capitol.
The bipartisan Home Committee on Felony Jurisprudence had deliberate to listen to immediately from Roberson on Friday at midday about his failed efforts to overturn his capital homicide conviction utilizing the state’s junk science legislation, which grants new trials in instances that relied on scientific proof that’s later discredited.
However Paxton’s movement, which argued that the panel’s subpoena to Roberson was “procedurally poor and overly burdensome,” excused the state jail system from complying with the committee’s subpoena and permitting Roberson to testify in particular person.
That left the way forward for Roberson’s testimony unclear.
Lawmakers have tried for weeks to deliver him to Austin after the Texas Supreme Court docket famous in November that state officers ought to have the ability to produce Roberson for testimony in compliance with a subpoena that doesn’t intervene with a scheduled execution. After the committee’s first subpoena expired, it served him with one other one this week.
Roberson was convicted of capital homicide in 2003 for the demise of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki, who was identified with shaken child syndrome. He has argued that new scientific proof discredits Nikki’s prognosis and exhibits she died of pure and unintended causes.
The primary subpoena from the Texas Home Committee on Felony Jurisprudence searching for Roberson’s testimony pressured a delay of his scheduled October execution. That led to a Texas Supreme Court docket ruling on Nov. 15 that mentioned a legislative subpoena of a demise row inmate couldn’t be used to postpone an execution.
Roberson’s execution has not but been rescheduled. The district legal professional in his case has not but requested that the court docket set a brand new execution date, which couldn’t land inside 90 days of her request.
Reps. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, and Jeff Leach, R-Plano, have accused the legal professional basic’s workplace of stalling Roberson’s testimony till the panel routinely dissolves subsequent month with the beginning of the brand new legislative session.
In his movement to dam Roberson’s testimony, Paxton requested the court docket to carry a listening to earlier than it decides whether or not to grant his request. However he requested that the listening to not be set earlier than Jan. 13, 2025, saying he “shall be in another country.”
The brand new legislative session begins — and the committee disbands — on Jan. 14.
“The legal professional basic’s workplace is aware of that and is attempting to delay till the beginning of the following session, which is simply horrifying and maddening to me,” Leach mentioned at an occasion with the Tribune on Dec. 6.
Paxton’s workplace, which legally represents the jail system, has hamstrung earlier efforts to safe Roberson’s in-person testimony by insisting that nothing legally compels the chief department to deliver him to the Capitol.
Fifteen emails between Moody and Paxton’s workplace obtained by the Tribune doc the continued tensions between lawmakers and the chief department over Roberson’s case.
In response to the committee’s first subpoena, Paxton’s workplace sunk plans for Roberson to testify at an Oct. 21 listening to in particular person and mentioned that the inmate would solely be permitted to look nearly as a consequence of public security issues — an association the panel opposed as a consequence of Roberson’s autism.
As a substitute, Moody urged that the committee might journey to demise row and take Roberson’s testimony there. However after Moody adjourned the Oct. 21 listening to, Paxton’s workplace shut that chance down.
“The subpoena issued to Mr. Roberson required his testimony on Monday, and TDCJ didn’t impede Mr. Roberson’s compliance with the subpoena, going as far as to try to facilitate his look by way of Zoom,” Kimberly Gdula, the legal professional basic’s chief of basic litigation, wrote to Moody on Oct. 25. “The Home’s subpoena has now expired, and the committee has adjourned.”
After the Texas Supreme Court docket issued its ruling that Roberson might testify so long as it did not intervene with an execution, Moody requested Gdula in an e-mail if they might attain an settlement on having Roberson testify with out requiring a brand new subpoena.
On Dec. 6, Gdula despatched a collection of questions and circumstances, and sought to bar Moody from immediately contacting the Texas Division of Felony Justice, which operates the state prisons.
She requested “why Roberson couldn’t furnish any wanted testimony via safer alternate options like distant look by video,” and claimed that the workplace “had no info as to what subjects you propose to debate that solely Roberson would have the ability to present related testimony on.”
She additionally wrote that representatives from the legal professional basic’s workplace, the Anderson County District Legal professional’s workplace and Gov. Greg Abbott’s workplace had “a proper to be current at any listening to the place Roberson is testifying so they might assert any objections to questions that transcend the scope of the Committee’s restricted authority to query a death-row inmate.”
Moody rejected the circumstances, reiterating the committee’s opposition to a digital look as a consequence of Roberson’s autism, referencing public supplies describing the committee’s reasoning in searching for Roberson’s testimony and noting that the committee and TDCJ had addressed varied security and logistical points on Oct. 18 — earlier than Paxton’s workplace stepped in.
“This can be a subpoena, so any opinion associated to ‘the import of Roberson’s testimony’ doesn’t authorize disobedience of it,” he wrote. “Anybody could attend this public listening to, however nobody shall be acknowledged to ‘assert any objections’ as a result of this isn’t an adversarial continuing and there’s no choose to whom it’s possible you’ll object.”
Moody and Leach, on the Tribune’s Dec. 6 occasion, vowed to proceed preventing for Roberson regardless of opposition from the legal professional basic’s workplace — and even via the beginning of a brand new legislative session.
“We is not going to relent within the pursuit of justice for Mr. Roberson,” Leach mentioned. “In the event that they need to thumb their nostril within the face of the Legislature that egregiously and blatantly, they are often — and ought to be — assured {that a} new committee subsequent session … will difficulty a brand new subpoena if we now have to.”
