Ken Paxton Insists ‘Shaken Baby’ Death Row Inmate Deserves Execution Despite Last-minute Stay

Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General, has made his position on Robert Roberson’s death row case quite plain. Paxton believes that the man is still guilty of murdering his daughter and should face the death penalty. This is supposedly the first time the individual has made a formal comment about the matter since the execution was halted.

“They have attempted to mislead the public by falsely claiming that Roberson was unfairly convicted,” Paxton stated in a news statement about Roverson’s daughter, Nikki, who died in 2002. The individual further claimed that the delay was due to “one-sided, extrajudicial stunts that attempt to obscure the facts and rewrite his past.”

“Nikki was abused by her father and died due to the trauma he inflicted,” the doctor’s office reported. The 57-year-old father was found guilty of his daughter’s death after prosecutors alleged Roberson killed her by shaking her and repeatedly punching her, resulting in a blunt-force trauma injury, sometimes known as “shaken baby syndrome.”

Roberson, who has been on death row since then, has attempted to appeal his conviction multiple times, only to be denied. However, the man’s plight was not disregarded, and just hours before his death by lethal injection last Thursday, he was informed that he would be granted a stay of execution.

Amanda Hernandez, a representative for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, told CNN that Roberson allegedly began thanking God after receiving the news. “He was shocked, to say the least,” Hernandez said. “He praised God and thanked his supporters.” And that was pretty much all he had to say. If Roberson had been executed, he would have been the first person killed in a case involving “shaken baby syndrome.”

A new execution date for Roberson has yet to be determined, but the man and his army of supporters, which includes several bipartisan members of the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence, do not intend to rejoice for long. According to Roberson’s counsel, they intend to petition the Texas Supreme Court and Governor Greg Abbott for full clemency.

“The vast team fighting for Robert Roberson – people all across Texas, the country, and the world – are elated tonight that a contingent of brave, bipartisan Texas lawmakers chose to dig deep into the facts of Robert’s case that no court had yet considered and recognized that his life was worth fighting for,” Gretchen Sween, his lawyer, wrote in a statement

Barry Scheck, the Innocence Project’s co-founder, told CNN that they were in “uncharted waters.” According to the publication, the decision to not execute Roberson was made two hours before he was scheduled to die. Several events occurred during that time in the Texas justice system.

It was revealed that in the minutes leading up to the execution, a group of Texas House members who believed in the man’s innocence petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to issue a restraining order against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Correctional Institutions Division, halting the execution temporarily. However, the order was overturned by a split Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Returning to court, the committee requested that the body issue an injunction against the parties that had once again postponed the execution. “For over 20 years, Roberson has spent 23.5 hours of every single day in solitary confinement in a cell no bigger than the closets of most Texans, longing and striving to be heard,” committee members Rep. Joe Moody and Rep. Jeff Leach said in a statement. “And while some courthouses may have failed him, the Texas House has not.”

Reference: Texas Attorney General insists ‘shaken baby’ death row inmate should be executed despite reprieve