Taking advantage of cover that Attorney General Ken Paxton provided after a week of silence, eight Republican state representatives filed a brief with the state Supreme Court on Friday in an attempt to distance themselves from a Texas House committee's push to stop the execution of convicted child killer Robert Roberson.
State Rep. Cody Harris of Palestine appears to be spearheading the belated counter-move aimed at erasing perceptions that the state could be on the verge of putting an innocent man to death for the death of a 2-year-old daughter more than 20 years ago. Harris lashed out at the Criminal Justice Committee's members on Thursday for their novel efforts to save Robert Roberson with a subpoena that ordered him to testify after the scheduled execution date last week.
The lawmakers who signed the Texas Supreme Court brief included State Reps. Cecil Bell of Magnolia, Greg Bonnen of Friendswood, Briscoe Cain of Deer Park, Mark Dorazio of San Antonio, Cole Hefner of Mount Pleasant, Tom Oliverson of Cypress and Tony Tinderholt of Arlington.
The belated attempt to discredit the House panel's actions on the death row inmate's behalf appears to have been orchestrated behind the scenes by Governor Greg Abbott's camp. Abbott expressed outrage this week behind closed doors - complete with threats of retribution against the legislators who interfered with a duty that's been his exclusively up to now.
The House Republicans who want Roberson to die accused the committee of staging a "one-sided re-trial" at a hearing at the Capitol in Austin on Monday.
"The House Committee has continued to use its hearing authority in the days since, attempting to wield the judiciary's power to re-determine facts and evidence about a capital murder -- despite decades of state-and-federal-court judges having rejected Roberson's claims."
The eight representatives expressed serious dismay with the prospect of the Legislature usurping the powers that are typically reserves for the courts and the governor as the head of the executive branch of state government in Texas.
"At practically every turn, a single committee of a single chamber of a single branch of government has encroached not only on the prerogatives of two other branches, but also on those of their colleagues in the same branch,"
the GOP members asserted in the four-page document that they submitted to the state's highest civil court.
The pro-execution cadre portrayed Roberson as a drug addict with a long history of criminal behavior. They argued that he beat his daughter to death despite claims that she died from the so-called "shaken baby syndrome."
The group told SCOTEX that the House hearing only heard testimony favorable to the position it had taken. But the brief that its members entered into the record had its fair share of omissions as well - declining to point out that the Texas Supreme Court had issued the order that halted the execution based on a motion from State Reps. Jeff Leach of Allen and Joe Moody of El Paso.
Moody is the chairman of the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. Leach, the Judiciary & Civil Jurisprudence Committee chair, is a member of the panel that Moody leads as well.
But the eight representatives also failed to mention that all of the five Republicans on the panel that includes four Democrats all have supported the bid by Leach and Moody to prevent Roberson from being put to death by the state. The committee lineup features two of the chamber's most conservative members of all time - GOP State Reps. Brian Harrison of Midlothian and Nate Schatzline of Fort Worth.
State Rep. David Cook - a Mansfield lawmaker who's the consensus choice of conservatives in a bid to oust GOP Speaker Dade Phelan - is a Criminal Jurisprudence Committee member who voted for the subpoena that gummed up the executioner's plans here.
Five of the Republicans who signed the brief - Bell, Cain, Dorazio, Oliverson and Tinderholt - have pledged to support Cook for speaker in the leadership election in January.
