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WASHINGTON (AP) – The unregulated carbon dioxide removal industry is calling on the U.S. government to implement standards and regulations to boost transparency and confidence in the sector that’s been flooded with billions of dollars in federal funding and private investment.

A report Wednesday by the Carbon Removal Alliance, a nonprofit representing the industry, outlined recommendations to improve monitoring, reporting, and verification. Currently the only regulations in the U.S. are related to safety of these projects. Some of the biggest industry players, including Heirloom and Climeworks, are alliance members.

“I think it’s rare for an industry to call for regulation of itself and I think that is a signal of why this is so important,” said Giana Amador, executive director of the alliance. Amador said monitoring, reporting and verification are like “climate receipts” that confirm the amount of carbon removed as well as how long it can actually be stored underground.

Without federal regulation, she said “it really hurts competition and it forces these companies into sort of a marketing arms race instead of being able to focus their efforts on making sure that there really is a demonstrable climate impact.”

The nonprofit defines carbon removal as any solution that captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it permanently. One of the most popular technologies is direct air capture, which filters air, extracts carbon dioxide and puts it underground.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have provided around $12 billion for carbon management projects in the U.S. Some of this funding supports the development of four Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs at commercial scale that will capture at least 1 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Two hubs are slated to be built in Texas and Louisiana.

Some climate scientists say direct air capture is too expensive, far from being scaled and can be used as an excuse by the oil and gas industry to keep polluting.

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School at Columbia University, said this is the “moral hazard” of direct air capture — removing carbon from the atmosphere could be utilized by the oil and gas industry to continue polluting.

“It does not mean that the underlying technology is not a good thing,” said Wagner. Direct air capture “decreases emissions, but in the long run also extends the life of any one particular coal plant or gas plant.”

In 2023, Occidental Petroleum Corporation purchased the direct air capture company, Carbon Engineering Ltd, for $1.1 billion. In a news release, Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub said, “Together, Occidental and Carbon Engineering can accelerate plans to globally deploy (the) technology at a climate-relevant scale and make (it) the preferred solution for businesses seeking to remove their hard-to-abate emissions.”

Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, doesn’t consider carbon dioxide removal technologies to be a true climate solution.

“I do welcome at least some interventions from the federal government to monitor and verify and evaluate the performance of these proposed carbon removal schemes, because it’s kind of the Wild West out there,” said Foley.

“But considering it can cost ten to 100 times more to try to remove a ton of carbon rather than prevent it, how is that even remotely conscionable to spend public dollars on this kind of stuff?” he said.

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy and a distinguished professor at Texas Tech University, said standards for the direct carbon capture industry “are very badly needed” because of the level of government subsidies and private investment. She said there’s no single fix for the climate crisis, and many strategies are needed.

Hayhoe said these include improving the efficiency of energy systems, transitioning to clean energy, weaning the world off fossil fuels and maintaining healthy ecosystems to trap carbon dioxide. On the other hand, she said, carbon removal technologies are “very high hanging fruit.”

“It takes a lot of money and a lot of energy to get to the top of the tree. That’s the carbon capture solution,” said Hayhoe. “Of course we need every fruit on the tree. But doesn’t it make sense to pick up the fruit on the ground to prioritize that?”

Other climate scientists are entirely opposed to this technology.

“It should be banned,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

Carbon removal technologies indirectly increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Jacobson said. The reason, he said, is that even in cases where direct air capture facilities are powered by renewable energy, the clean energy is being used for carbon removal instead of replacing a fossil fuel source.

“When you just look at the capture equipment, you get a (carbon) reduction,” Jacobson said. “But when you look at the bigger system, you’re increasing.”

NEW YORK (AP) – Federal regulators gave a strong push to electric-powered air taxis Tuesday by issuing a final rule for operating the aircraft and how pilots will be trained to fly them.

The head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Mike Whitaker, said the rule recognizes air taxis as an entirely new type of aircraft that will soon join airplanes and helicopters in the sky.

These aircraft take off and land vertically, like helicopters, but fly like fixed-wing planes. Many companies are working to get them on the market, but they have been held back by the lack of clarity over regulations to govern their use.

Whitaker said the FAA is stressing safety as it works to fold the new aircraft into the nation’s airspace. He said “powered-lift aircraft” are the first new category of aircraft in nearly 80 years, since the dawn of helicopters, and the rule will allow for their widespread operation.

Air taxi supporters call them a cleaner alternative to passenger planes that burn jet fuel. So far, however, current technology limits their size and likely means that they will be used most often in urban areas. Companies envision carrying people and cargo.

One of the companies in the new field, California-based Joby Aviation, praised the FAA regulation. CEO JoeBen Bevirt said the rules “will ensure the U.S. continues to play a global leadership role in the development and adoption of clean flight.”

Airlines see air taxis as a way to deliver passengers to airports. Delta Air Lines said in 2022 it would invest $60 million in Joby, and this month Toyota announced a $500 million investment. United Airlines is backing another California-based company, Archer Aviation, with an order for 200 aircraft that Archer said could be worth $1 billion with an option for $500 million more.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Arrests for illegally crossing the border from Mexico fell 7% in September to a more than four-year low, authorities said Tuesday. It was likely the last monthly gauge during a presidential campaign in which Republican nominee Donald Trump has made immigration a signature issue.

The Border Patrol made 53,858 arrests, down from 58,009 in August and the lowest tally since August 2020, when arrests totaled 47,283, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Mexicans accounted for nearly half of arrests, becoming a greater part of the mix. In December, when arrests reached an all-time high of 250,000, Mexicans made up fewer than 1 in 4. Arrests for other major nationalities seen at the border, including Guatemalans, Hondurans, Colombians and Ecuadoreans, have plunged this year.

San Diego was again the busiest corridor for illegal crossings in September, followed by El Paso, Texas, and Tucson, Arizona.

For the government’s fiscal year ended Sept. 30, the Border Patrol made 1.53 million arrests after topping 2 million in each of the previous two years for the first time.

The White House touted the numbers as proof that severe asylum restrictions introduced in June were having the intended effect, and blamed congressional Republicans for opposing a border security bill that failed in February. Vice President Kamala Harris has used that line of attack against Trump to try to blunt criticism that the Biden administration has been weak on immigration enforcement.

“The Biden Harris Administration has taken effective action, and Republican officials continue to do nothing,” said White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, a frequent administration critic and advocate for immigration restrictions, attributed recent declines to more enforcement by Mexican officials within their own borders, saying the White House “essentially outsourced U.S. border security to Mexico in advance of the 2024 election — policies that can be reversed at any time that the government of Mexico chooses.”

Arrests fell sharply after Mexico increased enforcement in December, and took a steeper dive after the U.S. asylum restrictions took effect in June. U.S. officials haven’t been shy about highlighting Mexico’s role.

Mexican authorities are encountering more migrants this year while deportations remain relatively low, creating a bottleneck. Panamanian authorities reported an increase in migrants walking through the notorious Darien Gap during September, though numbers are still well below last year.

Troy Miller, acting CBP commissioner, said last week that the administration is working with Mexico and other countries to jointly address migration.

“We continue to be concerned about any bottlenecks, we continue to look at those, we continue to address them with our partners,” Miller said at a news conference in San Diego.

The Biden administration has promoted new and expanded legal pathways to enter the country in an effort to discourage illegal crossings. In September, CBP allowed more than 44,600 people to enter with appointments on an online system called CBP One, bringing the total to 852,000 since it was introduced in January 2023.

Another Biden policy allows up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela with financial sponsors to enter monthly through airports. More than 531,000 people from those four countries have entered that way up through September.

EVERETT, Wash. (AP) — Wednesday is shaping up as one of the most significant days in a volatile year for Boeing, which is expected to report a huge third-quarter loss, introduce its new CEO on his first earnings call, and learn if machinists will end a strike that has crippled the company’s aircraft production for more than a month.

The strike is an early test for Kelly Ortberg, a Boeing outsider who became CEO in August.

Ortberg has already announced large-scale layoffs and a plan to raise enough cash to avoid a bankruptcy filing. He needs to convince federal regulators that Boeing is fixing its safety culture and is ready to boost production of the 737 Max — a crucial step to bring in much-needed cash.

Boeing can’t produce any new 737s, however, until it ends the five-week-old strike by 33,000 machinists that has shut down assembly plants in the Seattle area.

Ortberg has “got a lot on his plate, but he probably is laser-focused on getting this negotiation completed. That’s the closest alligator to the boat,” said Tony Bancroft, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, a Boeing investor.

Boeing hasn’t had a profitable year since 2018, and the situation is about to get worse before it gets better.

Analysts expect Boeing to announce Wednesday that it lost about $6 billion in the third quarter, including $3 billion in charges related to airline jets and $2 billion in losses for its defense and space programs.

Investors will be looking for Ortberg to project calm, determination and urgency as he presides over an earnings call for the first time since he ran Rockwell Collins, a maker of avionics and flight controls for airline and military planes, in the last decade.

The biggest news of the day, however, is likely to come Wednesday evening, when the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers reveals whether striking workers are ready to go back to their jobs.

They will vote at union halls in the Seattle area and elsewhere on a Boeing offer that includes pay raises of 35% over four years, $7,000 ratification bonuses, and the retention of performance bonuses that Boeing wanted to eliminate.

Boeing has held firm in resisting a union demand to restore the traditional pension plan that was frozen a decade. However, older workers would get a slight increase in their monthly pension payouts.

At a picket line outside Boeing’s factory in Everett, Washington, some machinists encourage co-workers to vote no on the proposal.

“The pension should have been the top priority. We all said that was our top priority, along with wage,” said Larry Best, a customer-quality coordinator with 38 years at Boeing. “Now is the prime opportunity in a prime time to get our pension back, and we all need to stay out and dig our heels in.”

Best also thinks the pay increase should be 40% over three years to offset a long stretch of stagnant wages, now combined with high inflation.

“You can see we got a great turnout today. I’m pretty sure that they don’t like the contract because that’s why I’m here,” said another picketer, Bartley Stokes Sr., who started working at Boeing in 1978. “We’re out here in force, and we’re going to show our solidarity and stick with our union brothers and sisters and vote this thing down because they can do better.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats in Texas will once again wait on Election Day to find out whether this is the year they can win a statewide race after three decades of losing to Republicans.

They’re pinning their hopes on the U.S. Senate, where Republican incumbent Ted Cruz faces a challenge from U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, a former NFL linebacker and civil rights attorney who flipped a competitive U.S. House seat to take office in 2018.

With so many Democrats defending Senate seats nationwide, Texas is one of the only states where a Republican senator is in a competitive race. Spending on the contest has topped $100 million, according to AdImpact, which tracks ad spending, swamping the money spent on the presidential election in Texas.

It’s been 30 years since Democrats won a statewide race in the Lone Star State, but that’s not for lack of effort. In 2002, Democrats were excited to run a “dream team” of candidates for Senate, governor and lieutenant governor in hopes that the racially diverse ticket would harness a new generation of Texas voters who could flip the state. They didn’t.

More recently, in 2018, Democrat Beto O’Rourke broke fundraising records in his race against Cruz. He lost. Two years later, Democrats hoped that M.J. Hegar would build upon O’Rourke’s momentum to defeat Sen. John Cornyn. She lost, too.

No Democrat has won Texas in a presidential election since Jimmy Carter in 1976, although Bill Clinton ran close in three-way contests in both 1992 and 1996. A unexpected win in Texas for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris would all but end Republican former President Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House.

Texas has 38 U.S. House seats, but only three districts — all in South Texas — are considered competitive.

In the state’s 28th Congressional District, Democratic U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar seeks reelection following his indictment on charges of bribery and money laundering earlier this year. In the nearby 34th District, Democratic U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez faces Republican Mayra Flores in a rematch of a 2022 contest that Gonzalez won by about 9 percentage points. In the Rio Grande Valley, Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz will again face 2022 Democratic nominee Michelle Vallejo in the 15th District.

The Associated Press doesn’t make projections and will declare a winner only when it has determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap. If a race hasn’t been called, the AP will continue to cover any newsworthy developments, like candidate concessions or declarations of victory. In doing so, the AP will make clear it hasn’t declared a winner and explain why.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris will head to reliably Republican Texas just 10 days before Election Day in an effort to refocus her campaign against former President Donald Trump on reproductive care, which Democrats see as a make-or-break issue this year.

Her campaign says Harris will visit Houston for an event Friday with women who have been affected by the state’s restrictive abortion laws, which took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. She’ll be going there after spending time in Georgia, another state with a restrictive law.

Since that 2022 high court decision, most Republican-controlled states have new abortion restrictions in effect, including 14 that ban the procedure at every stage of pregnancy. Harris has argued that Trump — who nominated three conservative justices to the Supreme Court who later voted to overturn Roe v. Wade — is responsible for worsening medical care for women and that he would seek further restrictions.

Campaign officials cast Harris’ plan to visit Texas as a nontraditional way to capture the attention of voters in battleground states who are inundated with campaign ads and run-of-the-mill campaign events. The most recent non-battleground visit Harris made was to Portsmouth, New Hampshire in early September to tout her small business tax plan. Since then, she’s traveled to the seven battleground states.

“Texas is the stage for this event,” said senior campaign adviser David Plouffe. “But for us, the most important audience are folks in the battlegrounds.”

Plouffe said the vice president is making the trip “to really tell a story about Donald Trump’s role in eliminating Roe v. Wade, what that’s meant for people in a state like Texas, and the stakes — if you live in a state currently without an abortion ban — that could be coming your way if Donald Trump wins.”

In 2016, Democrats, feeling sure of their chances against Trump in his first run for the White House, sent their nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Texas, Iowa and Ohio in hopes of running up the Electoral College score, while missing signs of trouble in Democratic-leaning states that flipped and sent Trump to the Oval Office.

“We’re not doing that,” Plouffe said, dismissing the notion that the campaign was trying to compete in Texas. “We’re diverting out of the battlegrounds because we think it’ll help us in battlegrounds.”

He said it “makes a lot of strategic sense” to go somewhere like Texas, “where you have the most horrific and tragic stories about what’s happening, and then directly link that to the threat that voters in these states without current bans should feel about Donald Trump’s potential next term.”

Women affected by abortion bans have been out campaigning for Harris, including Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who went into premature labor, developed sepsis and nearly died after doctors said they could not intervene to provide an abortion because Zurawski wasn’t in enough medical danger to allow the procedure. Harris has also highlighted the story of Amber Thurman, a Georgia mother who died after waiting 20 hours for a hospital to treat her complications from an abortion pill.

Harris will be joined Friday by Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, who is making a longshot bid to unseat Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. She is also scheduled tape a podcast interview with Brené Brown.

Trump, too, has tried events outside of battlegrounds to energize his supporters. He has a rally planned this weekend at Madison Square Garden in New York and last week had one at the site of the Coachella music festival in California.

Texas encapsulates the post-Roe landscape. Its strict abortion ban prohibits physicians from performing abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which can happen as early as six weeks or before. As a result women, including those who didn’t intend to end a pregnancy, are increasingly suffering worse medical care in part because doctors cannot intervene unless she is facing a life-threatening condition, or to prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily function.” The state also has become a battleground for litigation; the U.S. Supreme Court weighed on the side of the state’s ban just two weeks ago, leaving a lower court’s ruling in place.

Complaints of pregnant women in medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms in Texas and elsewhere have spiked as hospitals grapple with whether standard care could violate strict state laws against abortion. Several Texas women have lodged complaints against hospitals for not terminating their failing and dangerous pregnancies because of the state’s ban. In some cases, women lost reproductive organs.

Trump has constantly shifted his stances and offered vague and contradictory answers to questions on an issue that has become a major vulnerability for Republicans in this year’s election. He recently said he would vote against a constitutional amendment on the Florida ballot that is aimed at overturning the state’s six-week abortion ban.

About 6 in 10 Americans think their state should generally allow a person to obtain a legal abortion if they don’t want to be pregnant for any reason, according to a July poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Voters in seven states, including some conservative ones, have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to restrict them in statewide votes over the past two years.

In his first year as president, Trump said he was “pro-life with exceptions” but also said “there has to be some form of punishment” for women seeking abortions — a position he quickly reversed.

At the 2018 annual March for Life, Trump voiced support for a federal ban on abortion on or after 20 weeks of pregnancy. More recently, Trump suggested in March that he might support a national ban on abortions around 15 weeks before announcing that he instead would leave the matter to the states.

LEWISVILLE, Texas (AP) — Deep in the heart of Texas’ sprawl, the city of Lewisville embodies the Lone Star State.

Bisected by Interstate 35 and ribboned with six- and eight-lane thoroughfares lined with chain stores, Mexican restaurants and pawn shops, Lewisville, 23 miles north of Dallas, is a prototypical slice of the nation’s second-largest state. Its typical resident is about 36 years old, the same as in Texas. Similar to statewide, 6 out of 10 of its residents are not white, and two-thirds of its voters cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election.

Next door is the city of Flower Mound, a swath of subdivisions with names such as Teal Wood Oaks and Chaucer Estates. Flower Mound looks more like the electorate that has kept Texas dominated by Republicans for decades. It’s wealthier than Lewisville, more than two-thirds of its residents are white, and 78% of them voted in 2020.

That discrepancy between the diverse, potential electorate of Lewisville and the actual, heavily white electorate of Flower Mound has been the subtext for the past two decades of American politics.

For a long time, the presumption has been that closing that gap between Lewisville and Flower Mound — getting more people to vote, and the electorate to better represent the country’s actual population — would help Democrats and hurt Republicans. That’s because a bigger electorate would mean more minorities voting, and those groups historically lean Democratic.

That presumption helped spark the Great Replacement conspiracy theory among some conservatives, imagining a plot to import immigrants to substitute for more conservative white voters. It’s been part of the fuel behind Republican-led efforts to make it tougher to vote, especially in Texas, which has some of the strictest election laws in the country.

But this presidential election has flipped the script.

Republicans have invested in reaching what they believe is a vast population of infrequent, conservative-leaning voters. Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has been counting on support from younger, Latino and African-American voters who are less likely to go to the polls.

Meanwhile, Democrat Kamala Harris is relying on Black and Latino voters, but also on increasing her support among college-educated voters, a growing group that’s both highly likely to vote and helped put Democrat Joe Biden in the White House in 2020.

The contrast is clear in the neighboring cities in north Texas. In high-propensity Flower Mound, Republicans who used to dominate the suburb fear it’s trending Democratic. Meanwhile, in more diverse Lewisville, those who rarely vote or cannot are warming to Trump.

“I think Trump would make a difference,” said Brandon Taylor, 35, who cannot vote because of criminal convictions, but is trying to persuade his girlfriend, Whitney Black, to vote for Trump. “We need that extra vote,” he told Black as the two, now homeless, sat on a bench outside Lewisville’s public library.

Meanwhile, Martha McKenzie, a retired Naval officer in Flower Mound, is a former Republican who left the party over Trump.

“I just can’t get behind a lot of the BS behind Trump,” McKenzie said.

There are, of course, plenty of Harris supporters in Lewisville and numerous Trump voters in Flower Mound. The contrast between the towns goes more to an age-old adage voiced by Sally Ortega Putney on a recent night in a Flower Mound office park.

Putney, 59, recalled spending hours outside Lewisville’s Latino markets trying, unsuccessfully, to find new voters.

“We got our hearts broken trying all sorts of different outreach. The lower class, they don’t have the time, they’re too busy trying to feed their kids,” Putney said between calls that she and two other Democratic volunteers were making to voters.

She gestured around the room: “It’s the middle class that ends up running everything, because we have the time to do it.”

For decades in Texas, that has meant Republicans run things. The party has controlled the Legislature for more than 20 years and won every statewide race since 1994. As the state has steadily grown more diverse, the GOP has taken steps to protect its power.

Texas Republicans have drawn some of the most notorious gerrymanders in the country, reshuffling the lines of state legislative and congressional districts to protect GOP politicians and push the Democratic voters who could oust them into a few oddly shaped districts. That ensures Democrats remain the minority in the Legislature.

Lawmakers in 2021 tightened election laws in response to Trump’s false fraud claims. They banned election offices from holding 24-hour voting after it became popular in a major Democratic-leaning county and prohibited anyone from sending mail ballot applications to eligible voters.

Since then Texas Republicans have continued to push back against a perceived menace of improper voters.

Attorney General Ken Paxton sued two of the state’s largest and Democratic-leaning counties to stop their voter registration drives, and his office raided the homes of leaders of Latino civil rights groups in what it said was an investigation of possible election fraud.

“There’s no question that the design of a lot of Texas’ election laws, both old and new, is rooted in the idea of demographic change and that new voters won’t support the people in power,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Texas already has had recent experience with an upsurge in new voters, however, and it didn’t turn out as badly for Republicans as the party feared.

In 2018, Democrat Beto O’Rourke challenged Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. The little-known congressman became a national phenomenon for his populist message and get-out-the-vote pushes. He lost 51% to 48%.

Jim Henson, a political scientist at the University of Texas, said the new voters who turned out in 2018 were evenly split between Republicans and Democrats — only slightly more Democratic than the normally conservative-leaning Texas electorate.

“There are untapped voters for both parties,” he said.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas man whose execution was halted and then called to testify at the state Capitol did not show up Monday over growing pushback from state leaders who have blasted lawmakers’ last-ditch tactics to subpoena Robert Roberson and spare his life for now.

His absence at a highly anticipated state House committee meeting was another twist in what has become one of Texas’ most unusual and contested death row cases. A group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers have rushed to Roberson’s defense, saying outdated science led to a jury convicting him of killing his 2-year-old daughter in 2002.

After they subpoenaed Roberson last week to buy him more time, the attorney general’s office opposed efforts to bring him to the state Capitol and told the state’s highest court that doing so would present “myriad security and logistical concerns.”

The delayed execution has opened a rift in Texas between legislators and state GOP leaders, including Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who say the last-minute maneuver on Roberson’s behalf crossed a line.

“If this committee wanted to take a heavy-handed approach, there are dramatic ways that we could enforce that subpoena,” Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody said. “But we didn’t issue the subpoena to create a constitutional crisis, and we aren’t interested in creating division between branches of government.”

Roberson had been set last Thursday to become the first person in the U.S. executed over a murder conviction connected to a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome. He was taken to America’s busiest death chamber and was waiting in a holding cell when the Texas Supreme Court abruptly halted plans to give him a lethal injection.

Moody, the chairman of a state House committee that led efforts to stop the execution, said discussions about having Roberson eventually testify were still ongoing.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office had told lawmakers that Roberson would only appear by videoconference, which Moody said would be “poorly suited” for Roberson because he is autistic.

“That doesn’t mean Robert won’t testify at all,” said Moody, without saying when Roberson might testify or how.

Among those testifying Monday about Roberson’s case was daytime television psychologist “Dr. Phil” McGraw and best-selling author John Grisham. The veteran talk show host McGraw threw his full support behind Roberson, stating that there was not enough evidence to convict him of a crime.

“If you execute people when you now know better, you need to abolish the death penalty. If that’s the standard by which you’re gonna execute people, you’ve got a bad system,” McGraw said.

Roberson’s claims of innocence are backed by a group of Republican and Democratic legislators who say he was convicted based on outdated science.

Roberson received the death penalty for the 2002 death of daughter Nikki Curtis in the East Texas city of Palestine. Prosecutors argued that the infant’s death was caused by serious head trauma from being violently shaken back and forth. Roberson’s attorneys say that the bruising on Curtis’ body was likely due to complications with severe pneumonia and not child abuse.

Once Roberson testifies to lawmakers, prosecutors could seek a new execution date at any time, according to Gretchen Sween, one of his attorneys.

Lawmakers had sought to have Roberson transported from death row to appear in person, raising the possibility of an extraordinary scene in the Texas Capitol. However, the state attorney general’s office told the committee he would appear virtually.

Abbott’s office said the Texas Supreme Court should toss out the subpoena, writing that the House committee has “stepped out of line” in their first public statement on the case.

Almost 90 lawmakers across party lines, medical experts and civil rights advocates had called on Abbott to stay his execution. Abbott has not commented on Roberson’s case and the Texas parole board rejected pleas to grant clemency.

Rebuffed by the courts and Texas’ parole board in their efforts to spare Roberson’s life, legislators last Thursday subpoenaed Roberson to testify. Lawmakers on the House committee have expressed frustration with Texas’ junk science law, which they say has failed to work as intended, including in Roberson’s case.

The 2013 law allows a person convicted of a crime to seek relief if the evidence used against them is no longer credible. At the time, it was hailed by the Legislature as a uniquely future-proof solution to wrongful convictions based on faulty science. But Roberson’s supporters say his case points to faults in the judicial system where the law has been weakened by deliberate misinterpretation from the state’s highest criminal court.

In the last 10 years, 74 applications have been filed and ruled on under the junk science law. A third of applications were submitted by people facing the death penalty. All of them were unsuccessful.

Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell, whose office prosecuted Roberson, has previously told the committee that a court hearing was held in 2022 in which Roberson’s attorneys presented their new evidence to a judge, who rejected their claims.

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Lathan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.