Gov. Greg Abbott urged the Texas Supreme Court to toss out a subpoena ordering death row inmate Robert Roberson to testify in front of a Texas House committee, saying lawmakers “stepped out of line.”
The three-page letter sent Sunday by James Sullivan, Abbott’s general counsel, said only the governor has the constitutional authority to delay an execution. Sullivan warned that unless the court rejects the subpoena, “it can be repeated in every capital case, effectively rewriting the Constitution to reassign a power given only to the Governor.”
Abbott’s letter was the first time the governor has commented on the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence’s use of a subpoena as a tactic to stop Roberson’s execution.
Roberson, 57, was sentenced to death in 2003 in the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki. He was scheduled to be executed Thursday evening by lethal injection in Huntsville, but dozens of Republican and Democratic lawmakers believe Roberson has legitimate innocence claims.
In a novel attempt to stop his execution, members of the House committee voted 7-0 Wednesday to subpoena Roberson and order him to testify in person four days after his execution date. That set off a series of appeals and rulings in state courts, with the Texas Supreme Court ultimately ruling Thursday night to halt the execution and bar state corrections officials from impeding Roberson’s ability to comply with the subpoena.
In its letter to the court, Abbott’s office said the Texas Constitution grants him — not a legislative committee — the power to halt an execution.
“If the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence thinks itself entitled to testimony from a criminal on death row, a point which is not conceded, it should have done so without erasing the authority given exclusively to the governor,” Sullivan wrote.
The Texas Supreme Court’s stay of execution did not vacate Roberson’s conviction. Instead, the court said the legislative subpoena raised a constitutional question that deserved to be addressed.
The subpoena by the House panel created conflicting obligations for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, an executive branch agency, on whether to execute Roberson as directed or produce him for testimony as ordered by members of the legislative branch.
“These questions implicate the separation of powers at a high level,” Supreme Court Justice Evan Young wrote in a concurring opinion joined Thursday by Chief Justice Nathan Hecht and Justice Rebeca Huddle. “We do not have clear precedent on this question; once the question is resolved, future cases would be addressed in light of that resolution.”
Roberson did not testify before the House committee Monday after the state attorney general’s office raised objections. The committee is working on alternate methods for hearing from him.
