Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson III receives stay of execution

Robert Roberson III

There is breaking news in the case of Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson, who had a June 21 execution date. 

Mr. Roberson received a stay of execution today, after the Court of Criminal Appeals found that the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs had presented compelling evidence that his capital murder conviction was based on flawed science.

The CCA has stayed the execution and sent the case back to state district court for a hearing.

You can read the CCA order in Ex Parte Roberson at: http://bit.ly/2613syW.

Texas is scheduled to execute this man in six days—but four experts say he was convicted based on junk science

UPDATE: On June 16, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed Roberson’s execution, sending his case back to a trial court for a hearing on the new scientific evidence.

The scientific evidence was conclusive, doctors told a Texas jury in 2003: capital murder defendant Robert Roberson had violently shaken his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to death.

Thirteen years later—and just days before Roberson is scheduled to be executed—four medical experts are now claiming that the scientific theory used to convict him has been thoroughly debunked.

Roberson, 49, is the next death row inmate in America scheduled to be executed, and will go to the death chamber June 21. He was sentenced to death in 2003 for the murder of his daughter, Nikki Curtis.

At the time of Roberson’s trial, doctors believed that certain symptoms in a child could conclusively prove they were violently shaken or abused, based on a theory known as Shaken Baby Syndrome. But in the last decade, the four experts who submitted affidavits as part of his appeal say, there’s been a sea change in the scientific understanding of the issue.

Roberson, whose lawyers say suffers from “severe limitations in intellectual functioning,” was Nikki’s biological father but essentially shared custody with the parents of Nikki’s mother, whom she had lived with for the first two years of her life. He brought her home from her grandparents house in Palestine, Texas, on the evening of January 30, 2002, and put her to bed. Early the next morning, he was woken up by her crying, and found that she had fallen on the floor. She seemed OK, he told investigators, so he put her back in her bed and went to sleep. When he woke up again a few hours later, she was blue and barely breathing. Roberson rushed her to the hospital, and she was declared dead the next day.

Prosecutors dismissed Roberson’s account, his lawyers say, and instead charged him with murdering his daughter by shaking or beating her. At the time, most doctors believed that they could determine that a child could be diagnosed with Shaken Baby Syndrome based on three symptoms: retinal hemorrhaging, subdural hematoma/hemorrhaging, and edema, or brain swelling. Roberson’s jury was told that because Nikki had signs of all three, she must have been abused.

The defense didn’t contest that explanation or call any medical experts. On February 14, 2003, the jury convicted Roberson and sentenced him to death.

Now, however, a growing group of scientists disagree with this method of diagnosing Shaken Baby Syndrome. Research has shown that the same symptoms can be caused by other natural or accidental causes, the four experts who reviewed Roberson’s case write. They present a range of possible causes for Nikki’s death that were not explored during the trial: meningitis due to an ear infection; an injury before Roberson arrived; a short fall like the one he described or a congenital condition.

Click here to read the full article

Source: Fusion, June 16, 2016 (updated)

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