Renewed focus on Roberson case is latest in deluge of political pressure aimed at Texas judiciary

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

Standing in front of the state Capitol Wednesday afternoon, Dallas businessman and GOP donor Doug Deason urged all nine Republican judges of the state’s highest criminal court to grant death row inmate Robert Roberson a new trial. In doing so, he offered the elected judges a little political reassurance.

“All we're trying to do is … reach the Court of Criminal Appeals directly to them and say that, ‘Hey there, you've got a lot of cover. There are a lot of Republicans in this state who believe that Robert deserves another trial,’” Deason said at a press conference convened by a GOP state lawmaker.

Roberson, 58, is scheduled to be executed in two weeks for the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, who he was convicted of killing in 2003. He has maintained his innocence for more than two decades. Before her death, the child was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome, a serious brain injury that critics say has been too broadly applied against parents wrongly accused of child abuse.

Roberson’s lawyers say he deserves a new trial that would allow them to present evidence reflecting scientific developments, which they say would show Nikki died of chronic illness. Those calls have been joined by a bipartisan cohort of state lawmakers who have used dramatic legislative maneuvers to delay Roberson’s execution, sparking a bitter political fight with a dueling group of officials, including Attorney General Ken Paxton, who are convinced of Roberson’s guilt.

The Roberson dustup is only the latest in an extraordinary run of nakedly political legal fights that have tested the Texas judiciary’s ability to stay above the partisan fray, even beyond the usual pressures brought to bear on a system where judges are elected through partisan elections. This summer, Republican leaders asked the state’s highest courts to kick duly elected Democratic officials out of office and jail a former statewide Democratic candidate after shutting down his political organization. Those efforts followed Paxton’s successful crusade last year to unseat three judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals who declined to give his office unilateral power to prosecute voter fraud.

Now the high criminal court is being urged to wade into Roberson’s politically charged case, with promises that enough Republicans are on board with his exoneration to provide political cover. At the same time, Roberson’s lawyers aren’t taking any chances, asking a federal appeals court this week to step in and pause his execution — an apparent show of no confidence in the state’s own courts. Federal appeals courts are composed of lifetime appointees who have historically not been beholden to political and electoral pressures.

Fourteen days before Roberson’s scheduled execution, the Court of Criminal Appeals had not yet ruled on an appeal from Roberson that presented new evidence received by his lawyers in June. Nor has the court ruled on other pending motions, including one to stop the execution, his lawyers said.

Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge David J. Schenck said in an email the court was giving Roberson’s case “the careful attention we would give to any case coming before us.”

“As I’m sure you’ll understand, it would be improper for me to comment further on this or any other pending case,” Schenck wrote.

Amid the swirl of political pressures, the all-Republican courts so far have largely spurned efforts by GOP leaders to bring the hammer down on Democrats.

Also being tested is a new state appeals court created by the Republican-controlled Legislature to hear cases involving the state and the constitutionality of state laws. Previously filtered through appellate courts elected by Texas’ largest and bluest counties, those cases are now taken up by an all-Republican 15th Court of Appeals, filled by appointees of Gov. Greg Abbott. After those initial terms end, the bench will be filled via statewide elections, which Republicans have swept since 1994.

Last month, the court ruled against Paxton in his quest to stop former Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke’s fundraising, with the three Republican judges casting doubt on Paxton’s legal arguments and going out of their way to note his political ambitions.

Paxton responded with a statement blasting the decision and arguing that the court “has put its finger on the scales in a blindly political attempt to aid fraudster Beto O’Rourke.” He added that he was appealing the ruling to the Texas Supreme Court, which has faced its own heaping of political pressure in recent months.

In early August, the state’s high court for civil cases was asked by Abbott and Paxton to oust some Democratic lawmakers in the Texas House who left the state to protest passage of a new congressional map gerrymandered to net more seats for Republicans. The request was especially notable from Abbott, who had appointed six of the nine justices at the time of his emergency filing and employed two of them as his office’s general counsel.

Hours before that court released a schedule in August for the case, and as many anticipated its response to the historic request to remove elected officials from office, GOP hardliner Michael Quinn Sullivan threw a warning shot at the justices, writing on X that they “should ask the former members of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals about how the GOP base responds to unpopular rulings.”

Still, the court rejected Abbott’s request for a ruling within 48 hours, giving both sides weeks to file briefings under a timeline that ensured the case would run past the end of the ongoing special legislative session.

Sullivan was referring to the successful retribution campaign spearheaded by Paxton to unseat three Court of Criminal Appeals judges in the 2024 Republican primary elections, after the court ruled against him years prior.

In 2021, the court found that Paxton lacked authority to prosecute election-related crimes without an invitation from a local prosecutor. Paxton asked for a reconsideration, and the CCA affirmed its ruling.

In response, Paxton backed primary challengers to the three judges up for reelection who had ruled against him, while his allies set up a political action committee that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to topple the trio of incumbents off the bench. Schenck, the court’s current presiding judge, was one of the challengers boosted by Paxton, though he has said he never asked Paxton or his affiliated political groups for help.

Two other judges who sided against Paxton in 2021 and are up for reelection next year have decided against testing the attorney general’s political machine.

Judge Bert Richardson has announced a bid for chief justice of a lower appeals court, while Judge David Newell, in announcing he would not seek reelection, said earlier this year, “the court system is not the same as when I went to law school or even when I took the bench.”

Some pushing for Roberson’s exoneration worry his execution would further transform the judiciary. For years, Texas — under Republican leadership — has been a national leader in legislative reforms that safeguard against wrongful convictions, said Sandra Guerra Thompson, a criminal law professor at the University of Houston Law Center who was appointed by former Gov. Rick Perry to a wrongful conviction advisory panel.

“It’s surprising to me that we are dealing with this because it’s not like we haven’t had wrongful convictions in the past,” Thompson said of the Roberson case. “I’m a little befuddled as to why this one has suddenly become a cause célèbre.”

Thompson speculated that it is the law-and-order ethos of state GOP leadership that has motivated Texas’ strong protections against wrongful convictions, “because if the public loses confidence in the system, then juries are not going to want to sentence people.”

Beyond Roberson’s own life, that public confidence in the courts could also be at stake in his case, as sparring state lawmakers have placed his guilt in doubt while they publicly battle each other on social media over differing approaches to criminal justice.

"Putting all these protections in place, I think, has been one way that we could feel much better about the results that we are getting in court," Thompson said. "Roberson really is an innocence claim based on these kinds of concerns about faulty forensic science — which, again, it's ironic that that's what we're talking about, because that's the area where we've made the most progress."

---

Shape the future of Texas at the 15th annual Texas Tribune Festival, happening Nov. 13–15 in downtown Austin! We bring together Texas’ most inspiring thinkers, leaders and innovators to discuss the issues that matter to you. Get tickets now and join us this November.

TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.