BONOWITZ (Abraham Bonowitz): Too many Texans have been executed with new evidence that has been procedurally barred. The Robert Roberson case should be a...
Texas Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, center, and Rep. David Cook, R-Mansfield, right, listen to testimony during a committee hearing on the death row case of Robert Roberson on Monday, Oct. 21, 2024, in Austin. For more than 10 hours, a House committee heard detailed testimony about the flaws and failures of a system that legislators thought they had fixed, writes Abraham Bonowitz.
How many Texas prisoners have been executed in cases where newly developed or freshly evaluated evidence should also have been considered in court, but they were procedurally barred? This is something the Texas Legislature should examine thoroughly in light of Roberson’s near-execution.in 2023 after courts refused to consider newly developed evidence of his innocence.
Moody, Leach and others on their committee intervened in the case of Melissa Lucio in 2022, and despite having been previously rejected, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed itself and granted an evidentiary hearing just two days before she would have been killed.Roberson’s advocates have been making their case for months in the courts and with the public, and all of those efforts were not enough. If not for the legislators’ Hail Mary lawsuit, the execution would have gone forward.
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