Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has blocked Robert Roberson, a man given a death sentence based on the discredited “shaken baby syndrome,” from testifying at the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence.

Roberson’s execution date was set for October 17, but the Texas Supreme Court granted a stay of execution so he could testify, according to the Austin Chronicle. Roberson was scheduled to testify on December 20, but Paxton filed a motion on the 19th, telling prison officials to ignore a subpoena issued by the House committee, declaring it invalid.

Roberson was due to testify about the state’s “junk science law.” That law is supposed to provide new trials when a person is convicted based on flawed forensic evidence, according to the Texas Tribune. However, critics allege the law rarely actually allows new trials, the Chronicle reports. The committee was supposed to hear Roberson’s story to help determine if the law is ineffective.

READ MORE: Texas AG Ken Paxton Threatens Democrat-Leaning Counties Not To Mail Out Voter Registration Forms

Roberson was convicted in 2003 of capital murder following the death of his 2-year-old daughter, according to Newsweek. At the time, a doctor said the girl had died from “shaken baby syndrome,” defined as head trauma due to shaking. Shaken baby syndrome has been controversial since it was first coined. Biomechanics scientists say that shaking a baby can’t create a force strong enough to cause the type of trauma seen in these sorts of cases, according to the New Jersey Monitor. It’s often used as a catchall type diagnosis, when a baby dies but has no other signs of abuse.

In Roberson’s case, the child had been chronically ill, Newsweek reported. She had a fever and respiratory issues, which likely caused her death.

Other cases based on shaken baby syndrome have been overturned. This includes a 2000 case in Dallas, where Andrew Wayne Roark was initially sentenced to 35 years in prison in the death of his girlfriend’s 13-month-old. The Texas Supreme Court overturned Roark’s conviction this year about a week before Roberson was due to be executed, according to KERA-FM.

Despite this, Texas officials have declined to address Roberson’s case. Though Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned four people this week, Roberson was not one of them, according to the Houston Chronicle. In October, Paxton called attempts to delay Roberson’s execution “eleventh-hour, one-sided, extrajudicial stunts that attempt to obscure the facts and rewrite his past,” according to the Tribune. At the time, Abbott agreed, saying the House had “stepped out of line” in its attempts to delay execution so Roberson could testify.

Last year, Paxton was impeached by the state House on 20 separate articles of impeachment. The Texas Senate, which skews Republican 19 to 12, voted to acquit. The charges mostly centered around allegations Paxton used his position to help a campaign donor under investigation by the FBI for fraud.

A new date for Roberson’s execution has not been set.

Image via Shutterstock

Outgoing Representative Annie Kuster (D-N.H.) said that she made the decision not to run for her seat again after meeting with President Joe Biden early in the campaign and seeing his decline.

Kuster, 68, said this March she would not run for re-election to the House seat she’s held for nearly 12 years. She told the Boston Globe on Thursday that she’d made the decision after flying with Biden on Air Force One. She says that though she felt he was capable of serving the rest of his term as president, she could see the signs of aging.

“Just in my heart, [I] reached the conclusion that this would be a very challenging campaign for him, and to put himself out there for another four-year term was was going to be a struggle,” she told the Globe.

READ MORE: Two-Thirds of Americans Want Age Limits for Politicians, Supreme Court

She also suggested that Biden’s advisers may have tried to hide the effect that the president’s age had on him, but wasn’t sure how much the party had. When the Democratic party first started floating the idea of replacing him on the ticket, she compared it to discussing end-of-life care for loved ones.

“It was painful. I haven’t had these kind of conversations since I talked to my own parents about, you know, their aging and their limitations,” she said.

Kuster hopes other senior citizen politicians follows her lead.

Image by Tim Pierce via Wikimedia Commons

A large majority of Republicans think that President-elect Donald Trump will lower grocery costs, according to a new poll. Trump himself said that would be “very hard.”

Three-quarters of Republicans said grocery costs would go down under Trump, according to a new CBS News/YouGov poll. On the other hand, 68% of Democrats expected prices to rise. Independent voters were less sure, with 39% saying they expected an increase, 35% expecting a decrease, and 26% figuring the costs won’t change at all. The poll has a sample size of 2,244 American adults. The margin of error is 2.4%.

Despite campaigning on lowering the cost of groceries, Trump seemed to backtrack in his Time magazine Person of the Year interview.

READ MORE: The GOP Ran on Gas and Grocery Prices. Their Top Priority After Taking the House? Hunter Biden’s Laptop.

“It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard,” he said.

Trump is correct. There’s not a lot a president can do to directly affect grocery costs in the short term, according to Politico. The types of policies a president can enact are typically long-term solutions. One of Trump’s plans to lower costs across the board is specifically to work on the amount of fuel available, lowering energy costs. And while fuel is expensive, and the food industry requires lots of transportation, it’s just one factor, Politico reports.

But one of Trump’s favorite policies—increasing tariffs—is more likely to raise prices. Economist Wendy Edelberg, PhD, suggested that his proposed tariffs could boost food costs by 10-20%, according to Glamour. Tariffs also have historically cost people jobs. During Trump’s first term, his import tariffs cost 245,000 U.S. jobs, according to a 2021 study by the US-China Business Council.

Something that could help, however, is a regulation on price-fixing. In August, a lawsuit against data analytics and consulting firm Agri Stats alleged the company worked with meat processors to keep prices high, according to Food & Wine. The company is accused of sharing price and cost information among competitors so they can all agree on a higher-than-necessary price to keep profits high.

Like the meat industry, which is controlled by just four companies, according to Politico, the number of grocery chains is shrinking. A lack of competition can lead to situations like Kroger admitting to raising prices on dairy products further than necessary during the pandemic, according to Bloomberg. However, antitrust legislation and controls on prices are unpopular with lawmakers generally, especially with pro-business Republicans.

Daniel Scheitrum, a Cal Poly professor of agribusiness, told Politico that acting on this would be an effective way of lowering prices.

“This anti-competitive activity, it’s not just textbook discussion. This is actually happening and being litigated in our food system. If the federal government can rein in anti-competitive behavior, supply restrictions, price-fixing, that could bring down food prices in the U.S.,” he said.

But experts expect the new Trump administration to pull back on antitrust regulations outside of the tech industry, according to The Economist. And despite the effect lowering fuel costs could have on food prices, legal analysts at Stinson expect oil and gas industries to face less in the way of antitrust efforts.

Or, in other words, analysts across industries seem to think it’s unlikely the Trump administration will be able to lower grocery costs—directly or otherwise.

Image via Wikimedia Commons