Republicans express alarm that Texas execution nearly went ahead
Republican lawmakers in Texas expressed alarm on Monday at the apparent willingness of state officials to execute a potentially innocent man on the basis of junk science, as the political fallout of the 11th-hour reprieve of Robert Roberson continued to roil the state.
Several Republican members of the state’s House committee on criminal jurisprudence lined up to air their discontent with the handling of the case of Roberson, 57, who was convicted of killing his two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis in 2002 by violently shaking her.
Roberson was accused of “shaken baby syndrome”, a diagnosis that in recent years has been called into question as a reliable forensic tool.
Representative Jeff Leach told a hearing of the committee on Monday that he had come to be convinced that Roberson was “fully innocent”. And yet the prisoner, he said, had come “within 20 minutes and 20 steps of being executed by the state of Texas”.
Monday’s hearing of the committee not only amounted to one of the most dramatic outpourings of unease by Republican state politicians in a death penalty state about the flaws of the capital system, but it also temporarily spared Roberson’s life.
It was the committee’s issuing of a subpoena for the death row inmate to appear before it last Thursday night that persuaded the state’s supreme court temporarily to stay the execution, even as Roberson was sitting waiting to be escorted into the death chamber.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/21/republicans-texas-execution-robert-roberson
Shaken baby syndrome is pretty much now thought to be "junk science", the child had been sick for much of her life, and now even REPUBLICANS are alarmed...but AbBUTT and Paxton are still champing at the bit to execute the guy.........
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