Texas to ask for new execution date for death row inmate Robert Roberson at hearing

The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had requested last month that the Anderson County District Court schedule the new date for Roberson, writing in a motion that “the criteria for setting an execution have been met.” Paxton has requested an Oct. 16 execution date, one year after his execution was halted.

Smith County District Judge Austin Reeve Jackson is set to hear arguments about the attorney general’s request.

Roberson’s lawyer, Gretchen Sween, previously accused Paxton of rushing to seek an execution without letting the litigation play out.

“Robert was almost wrongfully executed last year,” Sween said in a statement in June. “But for the courageous intervention of Texas lawmakers from both parties the worst possible injustice would have been an irrevocable stain on Texas.”

Paxton, a Republican, had acquired the case from Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell, who was handling the prosecution’s case in recent years. It’s unclear why Paxton’s office was asked to take over, and his office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the latest execution date.

In the weeks after Roberson’s execution was stopped last fall, Paxton sparred with state lawmakers leading the House’s Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. Members had used the committee’s subpoena power to compel Roberson to testify at a hearing — an action that effectively halted his execution.

But Paxton’s office prevented Roberson from appearing in person, arguing the subpoena was “procedurally defective and therefore invalid.”

Roberson was set to testify in his case as it relates to a 2013 “junk science” law that allows Texas inmates to potentially challenge convictions based on advances in forensic science.

Roberson has maintained his innocence in his daughter’s death. In January 2002, Roberson and Nikki fell asleep in their East Texas home and he later awoke, he said, after he heard a sound and found that the toddler had fallen out of bed, according to court documents.

Later that morning, when Roberson discovered his daughter was unconscious and her lips were blue, he rushed her to a local emergency room. he showed little emotion, furthering law enforcement’s suspicions.

Within a day, a police detective arrested Roberson on a capital murder charge.

The jury in Roberson’s trial never heard the extent of how sick Nikki was from the day she was born, nor that she had been taken to the hospital more than 40 times in her short life. Two days before she died, she registered a 104.5 degree fever at the doctor’s office. She was sent home with the medication Phenergan that has since been deemed too dangerous for children — a drug that now carries a “black box warning” from the Food and Drug Administration.

Brian Wharton, the detective who arrested Roberson and has since retired, has said publicly that he now believes Roberson is innocent.

Wharton told NBC News’ Lester Holt in October that he arrested Roberson without knowledge of Nikki’s medical history and that he was unaware that Roberson is autistic, which would have explained his lack of emotion. (Roberson was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in 2018, years after Nikki’s death.)

While doctors and law enforcement concluded that Nikki was killed as a result of a violent shaking episode, Roberson’s defense team says a new understanding of “shaken baby syndrome” shows that other medical conditions can be factors in a child’s death, as it believes was in Nikki’s death.

Paxton, however, is adamant Roberson is guilty of murder.

In a list of reasons posted in October on X to set “the record straight,” he argued the father murdered his daughter by “beating her so brutally that she ultimately died.”