Texas Tribune / Michelle Pitcher
Republican State Rep. Lacey Hull speaks at a press convention Sept. 17.
This text was initially revealed by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative information outlet and journal. Join their weekly publication, or observe them on Fb and X.
A bipartisan majority of the Texas Home of Representatives is asking for clemency for Robert Roberson III, who’s scheduled to be executed on Oct. 17. If the execution strikes ahead, Roberson would be the first individual in the US put to dying based mostly on the controversial “shaken child syndrome” speculation (SBS).
On Tuesday, his authorized group submitted a clemency utility to the Board of Pardons and Paroles and to Governor Greg Abbott, together with letters from a bipartisan group of greater than 85 state legislators (and counting) and a slew of medical and authorized professionals in a last-ditch effort to halt the execution after the Texas Courtroom of Legal Appeals struck down Roberson’s appeals final week.
The sturdy exhibiting of help from either side of the aisle for a condemned individual is uncommon in Texas, which has executed extra folks than some other state for the reason that dying penalty was reinstated within the Seventies. However legislators additionally just lately rallied behind Texas dying row prisoners Rodney Reed — whose request for a listening to in entrance of the U.S. Supreme Courtroom was denied in July — and Melissa Lucio, whose execution was halted in 2022 however whose case stays pending after a trial decide beneficial her conviction be overturned in April. Reed and Lucio each have innocence claims and, in Lucio’s case, as in Roberson’s, her legal professionals argue that no crime occurred and that her daughter’s dying was unintentional.
Of their letter to the clemency board, legislators raised explicit concern that Texas’ “junk science legislation” — which has been in place for greater than a decade — isn’t being revered by the courts. The legislation particularly permits folks to attraction convictions that had been based mostly on outdated scientific proof, however in Texas, nobody on dying row has efficiently leveraged this legislation to acquire a brand new trial.
“We as a legislature truly created a means for folks like Mr. Roberson to problem convictions based mostly on science that later seems to be flawed,” stated Democratic state Consultant Joe Moody at a press convention Tuesday. “We modified the legislation to present that energy. … So far as we are able to inform, although, the courts merely aren’t partaking in that course of. So convictions are being allowed to face on junk science.”
Republican state Consultant Lacey Hull stated throughout the press convention that as a pro-life conservative, she is “tremendously involved about the opportunity of the state executing Robert Roberson, an harmless man.”
Kate Judson, government director of the Heart for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, stated Tuesday that Roberson’s case is “some of the egregious examples” of unreliable forensics getting used to convict somebody of against the law that by no means truly occurred.
Roberson was convicted in 2003 by an Anderson County jury of killing his 27-month-old daughter Nikki. On the morning of January 31, 2002, Roberson rushed the younger woman — who was chronically in poor health and had made a number of journeys to the emergency room with a excessive fever and different signs within the weeks earlier than she died — to the Palestine Regional Medical Heart, saying he had discovered her mendacity blue and limp after a brief fall from their mattress. Nikki was transferred to Youngsters’s Medical Heart Dallas, the place a pediatrician recognized the younger woman with “shaken child syndrome.” Nikki was then taken off life help with out her father’s consent — which Hull known as a violation of his parental rights — and died on the hospital.
Courtesy Pictures / Roberson Household, Innocence Challenge, Gretchen Sween
Robert Roberson in household footage, together with together with his daughter.
This was the diagnostic standards on the time of Roberson’s conviction. At his trial, Roberson’s personal lawyer instructed jurors that Nikki’s dying was “sadly a shaken child case,” regardless of his shopper’s innocence claims.
That very same trial lawyer “rejects Robert’s protestations of innocence, is not going to take heed to him about how he did nothing to hurt this baby,” Roberson’s present lawyer, Gretchen Sween, stated throughout a separate press convention Tuesday. “And it continues like that by way of trial, the place the monstrous lies simply proceed one after one other.”
There isn’t any debate that shaking could cause head trauma in infants and babies. However the way in which the analysis was reached in Roberson’s and different modern circumstances — by presuming abuse based mostly on sure signs with out first eliminating different doable causes — has grow to be extremely controversial. Nationally, at the least 34 dad and mom or caregivers have been exonerated after being convicted of deliberately harming youngsters based mostly on the outdated SBS diagnostic course of.
Today, most medical professionals will think about a toddler’s complete medical historical past and prior accidents earlier than diagnosing abuse, and in 2021, Texas lawmakers handed a legislation giving dad and mom the precise to acquire a second medical opinion on the state’s dime earlier than a toddler might be faraway from the house based mostly on medical suspicion of abuse.
However these protections aren’t retroactive.
Roberson has stared down one earlier execution date. He was scheduled to die by deadly injection in June 2016, however the Courtroom of Legal Appeals stepped in to halt the execution so a decrease courtroom might conduct an evidentiary listening to.
New knowledgeable opinions reached after that listening to — together with examinations of Nikki’s head and lung scans that time to advanced pneumonia as her reason behind dying — haven’t been thought-about by any courtroom.
Roberson’s appeals for clemency have garnered different noteworthy help, from Brian Wharton, the unique Palestine Police Division detective who testified in opposition to him at his trial, to bestselling creator John Grisham.
“My testimony helped convict [Roberson] of homicide and despatched him to dying row,” Wharton stated throughout the morning press convention. “However for all of the years since, I’ve believed that justice was not completed. The system failed Robert, and the system failed to supply Robert true justice.”
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