The Texas Department of Criminal Justice keeps an online log of everyone the state has executed since the 1980s. Each person has multiple numbers associated with them: their age, their prison identification number, and one that notes the cumulative milestone their execution represents for the state. Since 1982, 591 Texans have been executed. Come Thursday October 17, that number will tick up by one if the scheduled killing of Robert Roberson—a man who maintains his innocence in the death of his infant daughter—proceeds.
Roberson’s appeals have repeatedly been shot down by the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), despite bipartisan calls for his execution to be halted and the evidence reexamined in light of new scientific understandings of the “shaken baby syndrome” diagnosis—which has changed significantly since Roberson was convicted in 2003. The CCA declined to reconsider its stance on Roberson’s case last week, a decision that Republican state Representative Jeff Leach called “terribly unjust and unconscionable.”
Each and every person executed by the state has first had their fate weighed by the elected judges on the CCA, which decides final matters in Texas of criminal jurisprudence.
