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The Texas Courtroom of Legal Appeals denied one among dying row inmate Robert Roberson’s remaining appeals on Friday, declining to halt his Oct. 17 execution and once more rejecting his long-standing declare of innocence and argument that his conviction was based mostly on a now-debunked shaken child syndrome analysis.
Roberson, who was convicted of capital homicide in 2003 for the dying of his ailing 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, has maintained his innocence over 20 years on dying row.
He has argued that his conviction was based mostly on a flawed shaken child syndrome analysis given to his daughter, which presumed abuse on his half and didn’t think about her extreme sickness earlier than her dying.
Roberson had requested the Texas Courtroom of Legal Appeals to keep his execution, pointing to developments in what his attorneys see as a parallel, non-capital case out of Dallas County. In that case, the Texas Courtroom of Legal Appeals overturned the conviction of a person on Oct. 9, discovering that the shaken child syndrome analysis on the heart of his prosecution was now scientifically doubtful.
Roberson had additionally urged the courtroom to rethink an earlier attraction based mostly on Texas’ 2013 junk science legislation — an attraction that the courtroom beforehand denied with out reviewing its deserves — citing considerations from a majority of the Texas Home that the legislation was not being correctly carried out by the judiciary.
The Texas Courtroom of Legal Appeals denied each requests on Friday, with out providing a written opinion, and leaving Roberson with few choices forward of his imminent execution.
After the choice, state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso and chair of the Texas Home Legal Jurisprudence Committee, referred to as a listening to of the committee for Oct. 16.
“We’re barreling towards an execution when a strong bipartisan majority of #txlege reps aren’t even sure a crime occurred — and are very sure due process didn’t,” Moody wrote on social media Friday after listening to information of the courtroom’s determination. “We have to do all we can to pump the brakes before this stains Texas justice for generations.”
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If he’s executed, Roberson would turn out to be the primary individual within the nation put to dying on the idea of a shaken child syndrome analysis.
In a concurring opinion, Texas Courtroom of Legal Appeals Choose Kevin Yeary wrote on Thursday that the case was “not just a ‘shaken baby’ case,” pointing to proof introduced by the prosecution at trial suggesting that Roberson’s daughter “suffered multiple traumas.”
Roberson’s attorneys have disputed that conclusion, saying that the state’s declare that Nikki suffered a number of impacts is “erroneous” and “flatly misrepresents what was established during the evidentiary hearing.”
“Even more evidence supporting Mr. Roberson’s innocence, proving the actual causes of Nikki’s death, has been submitted to the CCA more recently, yet the court clearly has elected not to consider it,” Gretchen Sween, Roberson’s lawyer, mentioned in a press release on Friday. “Instead, the CCA is relying on a deceptive and unsubstantiated argument the State clings to in its zeal to execute an innocent man and turn the spotlight off this gross miscarriage of justice.”
The courtroom’s determination comes amid a drumbeat of public advocacy on Roberson’s behalf, together with requires his exoneration from the lead detective in his case and help for clemency from a bipartisan majority of the Texas Home.
Roberson has a pending movement in Anderson County Courtroom, the place he was tried, to vacate his execution warrant and recuse the choose who set his execution date. He alleged that the choose, who’s retired, lacked jurisdiction to deal with his case and had given motive to query her impartiality. The courtroom has a listening to set for Tuesday to think about his movement.
He has additionally requested clemency from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Greg Abbott. The board has till Oct. 15, two days earlier than Roberson’s scheduled execution, to determine whether or not to advocate clemency, which might be as much as Abbott to grant.
“Texas must stop its relentless pursuit of Robert Roberson’s wrongful execution,” Sween mentioned. “If the courts will not fulfill their role as the neutral arbiters of justice, then the Board and Governor Abbott must step in to prevent an irreparable injustice.”
In January 2002, Roberson rushed Nikki’s limp, blue physique to the hospital after waking to search out her unconscious and fallen from the mattress of their Palestine house in East Texas. However medical doctors and nurses, who have been unable to revive her, didn’t imagine such a low fall may have induced the deadly accidents, they usually suspected youngster abuse.
At trial, medical doctors testified that Nikki’s dying was in line with shaken child syndrome — by which an toddler is severely injured from being shaken violently forwards and backwards — and a jury convicted Roberson.
All through his appeals, Roberson’s attorneys sought to disprove his daughter’s shaken child analysis. Citing a spread of professional opinions and new proof — together with medical information illustrating Nikki’s extreme sickness and medicines within the days main as much as her dying and a long-lost CAT scan — his attorneys argued that the toddler died from pure and unintentional causes, not from head trauma.
“No informed doctor today would presume abuse based on a triad of internal head conditions, as occurred in Robert’s case,” his attorneys wrote in his clemency software. “But in the era when Robert was accused and convicted, conventional medical thinking gave doctors permission to skip consideration of any other factors and presume shaking and inflicted head trauma — an approach that has since been completely rejected as unsound.”
Roberson’s attorneys wrote in filings that, on the time of her dying, Nikki had “severe, undiagnosed” pneumonia that induced her to cease respiration, collapse and switch blue earlier than she was found. As an alternative of figuring out her pneumonia within the days earlier than her dying, they wrote, medical doctors prescribed her Phenergan and codeine — medicine which can be now not given to kids her age, and which they argued additional suppressed her respiration.
“It is irrefutable that Nikki’s medical records show that she was severely ill during the last week of her life,” Roberson’s attorneys wrote, noting that within the week earlier than her dying, Roberson had taken Nikki to the emergency room as a result of she had been coughing, wheezing and combating diarrhea for a number of days, and to her pediatrician’s workplace, the place her temperature was recorded at 104.5 levels.
Prosecutors, in the meantime, maintained that the proof supporting Roberson’s conviction was nonetheless “clear and convincing” and that the science round shaken child syndrome has not modified as a lot as his protection attorneys claimed.
The Texas Courtroom of Legal Appeals denied Roberson’s attraction outlining new medical proof on Sept. 11 on procedural grounds, with out reviewing the deserves of his claims.
The courtroom beforehand halted Roberson’s execution in 2016 after the scientific consensus round shaken child diagnoses cracked. Whereas medical professionals have been educated on the time of Nikki’s dying to presume abuse when infants introduced sure inner head accidents, Roberson’s attorneys argued that the medical group now acknowledges these signs as probably attributable to numerous naturally occurring diseases and accidents.
The 2016 keep was issued on the idea of Texas’s groundbreaking 2013 “junk science law,” which permits the courtroom to overturn a conviction when the scientific proof used to convict somebody has since modified or been discredited.
In passing the invoice, lawmakers highlighted instances of toddler trauma that used defective science to convict defendants as examples of the instances the laws was meant to focus on. However critics argued that within the decade because the invoice turned legislation, it has not often offered justice as meant to wrongfully convicted people.
In 2023, the Texas Courtroom of Legal Appeals determined that doubt over the reason for his daughter’s dying was not sufficient to overturn Roberson’s dying sentence, and his new execution date, Oct. 17, was set in July.
In his most up-to-date attraction denied on Friday, Roberson’s attorneys pointed to a shaken child syndrome case out of Dallas County, by which the Texas Courtroom of Legal Appeals on Wednesday overturned the conviction of a person whose 2000 prosecution for injuring a toddler relied on a flawed shaken child syndrome analysis.
Roberson’s attorneys argued that the testimony about shaken child syndrome introduced in that Dallas case and in Roberson’s trial have been “virtually identical,” and each instances “hinge on the same hypothesis.”
His attorneys have additionally argued that his autism, which was not identified till 2018, “directly contributed” to his conviction, with medical doctors and legislation enforcement viewing his “flat demeanor” as a “sign of culpability.”
After studying about Roberson’s incapacity and Nikki’s sickness, Brian Wharton — the lead detective in Nikki’s dying who sided with the state at trial — mentioned that he believed in Roberson’s innocence and regretted his position within the trial.
“I will be forever haunted by my participation in his arrest and prosecution,” Wharton, who provided a letter in help of clemency, mentioned on Sept. 17. “He is an innocent man.”
Roberson’s clemency petition was submitted alongside letters of help signed by dozens of his associates and family members, scientists and medical professionals, parental rights teams, organizations that advocate for folks with autism, religion leaders and attorneys who’ve represented folks wrongfully convicted of kid abuse.
These letters depicted a delicate man of religion, who was involved most of all about his two grown kids with disabilities, and who remembered folks’s favourite colours and despatched handmade birthday playing cards to everybody he met.
“This man would never harm another person, especially not his small little baby girl!” Manuela Doris Roberson, whom Roberson married in 2022, wrote in a single letter. “Robert’s life is worth more to me, his children, his friends and loved ones than all the treasures of this world.”
A bipartisan majority of the Texas Home — 86 out of 150 members — urged the Board of Pardons and Parole on Sept. 17 to advocate clemency, citing “voluminous new scientific evidence” that they mentioned prompt Roberson’s innocence and defined that the reason for his daughter’s dying was pure and unintentional.
A few of these lawmakers visited Roberson on dying row on Sept. 27, and described him afterward as hopeful and dedicated to his religion and serving to others.
“I thought I’d be bringing Robert a message of hope today, but instead, I left inspired myself,” Moody, the state consultant, mentioned in a press release. “He’s clearly suffered greatly, but he was still optimistic and future-focused as he told us about the good he wants to do for other people who’ve gone through what he’s experienced. His faith and spirit just reinforced my commitment to fighting for him so that he has that chance — and so that this injustice never happens to another Texan.”
