30 January 2025 :
January 28, 2025 - Texas. Texas executions decline, but death penalty system remains flawed----Robert Roberson’s case is reason enough for pause.
For many years, this page has been raising concerns about flaws in Texas’ death penalty system, and the risk that we as citizens of this great state have of being party to the execution of the innocent.
Whether someone favors the death penalty or not, no one can rightly accept a system that risks such a terrible thing.
Thankfully, for any number of reasons, the use of the death penalty has been in steady decline in Texas. We wrote in 2016 how executions had slowed from a high of 40 in 2000 to a low of seven that year.
The Texas Tribune reported last week that the population of death row and the number of executions carried out continues to decline. Last year, the state carried out four executions. In 2023, it was eight. And in 2022, it was five, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Yet, despite these low numbers, Texas’ use of the death penalty continues to raise profound questions of guilt or innocence.
Right now, the most pressing case is that of Robert Roberson III, whose death sentence was postponed through the heroic 11th-hour work of state Reps. Jeff Leach and Joe Moody. Roberson’s devoted legal team has demonstrated to both Republicans and Democrats that there is at least some reason to doubt Roberson’s conviction in the death of his daughter Nikki.
Roberson’s case is not the only recent death penalty case where credible doubt about innocence and guilt has been raised. Melissa Lucio was declared “actually innocent” last year for the 2008 conviction in the death of her two-year-old daughter.
There are simply too many such cases since the state’s resumption of the death penalty in 1982 not to ask for a pause in carrying out continued executions while the system is reviewed.
Roberson’s case alone cries for reconsideration. Many who believed in Roberson’s guilt are now convinced of his innocence, including the lead investigator in the case. We have examined the facts of the case closely with an open mind and cannot say with any confidence whether Roberson is guilty or innocent. We believe that any fair-minded person who undertook the same review would come to the same conclusion.
If the doubt in Roberson’s case is not sufficient to ensure he isn’t executed, how can we have confidence in this system at all? We believe Texas prosecutors, judges and juries have intuited that this is a flawed system and that is a reason for the decreased number of executions.
If so, let’s say that collectively and ask ourselves the hard questions that must be asked before we take another life.
