Not all efforts to spare death row inmates are equal.

For months, death penalty opponents have worked to stop the October execution of Robert Roberson, who, if Texas has its way, will be the first person in the nation put to death on account of the dubious concept of shaken baby syndrome. The Innocence Project and others are getting Roberson’s story into the media. Meanwhile, no one is talking much about the Sept. 24 execution of another Texas inmate convicted of murdering his child – Travis Mullis.

That is, no doubt, largely because Mullis does not dispute his guilt. He was 21 years old in 2008, when, after fleeing to Philadelphia, he turned himself in to police and confessed to sexually abusing and murdering his 3-month-old child. He had a lifelong history of mental illness but was deemed competent to stand trial and sentenced to death in 2011.

Mullis’ current attorneys, Shawn Nolan and Peter Walker of the Federal Community Defender’s Office, discussed their client’s mental illness and how it has sabotaged any attempt to appeal his case in court filings last year. The attorneys say that by the age of 3, Mullis was being treated for emotional problems. At 6, he told a therapist he was being sexually abused by his adoptive father. Through the rest of his childhood, he was in and out of mental health treatment centers, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder. At 18, his adoptive mother bought him a one-way bus ticket to the Houston area, where he lived with a woman he’d met online, with no access to medication and no apparent ability to care for himself.

His new attorneys say his original attorneys, appointed to defend Mullis at trial, did a poor job of describing the depths of his mental illness and that a better picture could have persuaded his jury to give him life without parole instead of death. “The jury heard just a fraction of the horrors in Mullis’s life,” they wrote.

After arriving on death row, Mullis wavered for months, and then years, over whether to go forward with his appeals. He repeatedly dismissed his attorneys, then called them back to the case. In 2012, the state courts decided he had forfeited his right to an appeal.

Immediately afterward, Mullis wanted his appeals back. His attorneys filed a writ of habeas corpus in federal court in 2013 and the same scenario played out: His attorneys attempted to get his claims seen by a court; Mullis fired the attorneys; Mullis called them back. In 2017, he wrote a federal court that his request to waive his appeals was “final and will not be withdrawn under any circumstances.” At a hearing in 2019, he revoked the waiver and said he wanted to appeal.

In 2021, the federal courts also decided Mullis had given up his right to appeal. In 2023, Nolan and Walker asked them to reconsider, arguing, among other things, that Mullis was not competent to waive the appeals. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the request and as of this writing no court has formally considered them.