A man on death row after being convicted of killing his daughter through Shaken Baby Syndrome, Robert Roberson, received a last-minute stay of execution last week, but political clashes between the Texas house and Governor Abbott thwarted his scheduled testimony before a state house committee on Monday, despite the subpoena that temporarily spared his life.

The chairman of the Texas house criminal jurisprudence committee, Joe Moody of El Paso, announced that Roberson would testify at the start of Monday’s hearing. The committee had requested that he testify in person, but Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, blocked that, saying he would only be allowed to testify via videoconferencing.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about videoconferencing Robert in today,” Mr. Moody said. “I believe that that’d be perfectly reasonable for most inmate witnesses, but Robert is a person with autism who has significant communication challenges, which was a core issue that impacted him at every stage of our justice system.”

“Our committee simply cannot agree to videoconference,” he added.

The announcement came after the Texas governor made public statements denouncing the committee’s move last week.

“Here, the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence has stepped out of line. The Legislative Branch is supposed to move first,” Governor Abbott said in an amicus brief filed on Monday morning, breaking his long silence on the matter. He argues that the power to grant clemency lies with him alone.

“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,” he said.

The hearing is just the latest in a contentious argument in the Lone Star State over its capital punishment policies — some of the most stringent in the nation. The committee had issued a subpoena for Mr. Roberson just two hours before he was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection.

The order was the first in Texas in which one high court blocked the order of another, according to the Texas Tribune. 

The move came after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had declined multiple times to stop Roberson’s execution. Evidence and testimony that show that his daughter, 2-year-old Nikki Curtis, did not die as a result of Shaken Baby Syndrome.

The state denied a recent motion to have Roberson’s conviction overturned despite the introduction of opinions from three medical experts who found that Nikki had likely died as a result of undiagnosed illness. The state ignored a Texas statute, known as the “junk science law,” which since 2013 allows any person convicted of a crime to seek relief if the evidence used against him or her is no longer credible.

Roberson’s legal team cited this new evidence, saying it proves that Nikki had not died of head trauma. In the week before her death, her father had taken her to an emergency room and a doctor’s office because she had been coughing, wheezing, had severe stomach issues, and had a temperature above 104 degrees.

“It is irrefutable that Nikki’s medical records show that she was severely ill during the last week of her life,” Roberson’s attorneys wrote in their opposition to the sentencing for an execution date. “There was a tragic, untimely death of a sick child whose impaired, impoverished father did not know how to explain what has confounded the medical community for decades.”

Prosecutors said that the evidence did not disprove their case against the father and maintained that the child had died from injuries inflicted. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed the defendant’s motion to challenge the sentence without reviewing the mounting evidence that suggests Nikki had died of natural causes.

“Robert’s fate is now at the mercy of the Governor. He and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles are the only ones standing in the way of a horrific and irreversible mistake: the execution of an innocent man,” Roberson’s attorney, Gretchen Sims Sween, said in a press release.

“Robert Roberson lived every parent’s nightmare when his beloved daughter experienced a medical crisis and collapsed in her sleep. Then the State compounded the horror by sending him to death row for more than 20 years for a crime that never occurred.”

Roberson would be the first person in America to be put to death for Shaken Baby Syndrome if the sentence of death is carried out. Texas is known for having the highest execution rate in America.

In 2023 alone, the Lone Star State was responsible for a third of the 24 executions carried out nationwide, according to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Of the eight men executed in Texas last year, six were found to have significant intellectual or mental health issues.

“What is even more appalling is that most of their jurors never heard about these impairments, or the traumatic life stories of the men they sentenced to death,” TCADP’s executive director, Kristin Houlé Cuellar, said in a September press release.

Roberson’s case has underscored the call for state legislators to consider the process by which someone is sentenced to death. Texas’s high execution rate is due to several factors, including a broad statute that allows a more comprehensive range of offenses to be classified under capital punishment than other states and an appeals process that moves swiftly when compared to other states.

The ongoing debate over Roberson’s case comes as the same high court in Texas ordered a new trial for a Dallas-area man who was convicted in 2000 of injuring a child by shaking, Andrew Roark, citing how medical understanding had changed regarding the diagnosis of Shaken Baby Syndrome.