Robert Roberson will remain alive for the time being. The Supreme of Texas has ordered this Thursday night to stop at the last minute the execution of the prisoner, convicted of the murder in 2002 of his two-year-old daughter. The highest court in the state has ruled on a case that has been rejected by both the Supreme Court and the Texas Circuit of Appeals. Roberson, 57, has a large group of supporters, including Democratic and Republican politicians, who believe that he was sentenced to death in a trial with scientific evidence that has not stood the test of time.
Roberson, who has always defended his innocence, was going to become this Thursday the first executed in the history of the United States for a case of shaken baby syndromea type of child abuse that can cause brain injuries and even death if a minor is shaken. The syndrome has been at the center of debate among experts. Voices from the medical community have been skeptical that there is conclusive scientific evidence to confirm the syndrome, which was reported in the past by organizations like the WHO. Some scientists advise against his diagnosis being used in criminal proceedings that lead to death row.
The case that has Roberson on death row began in 2002. His daughter Nikki, who was born with chronic respiratory problems, had been sick that beginning of the year. He had a fever and for brief moments he stopped breathing and turned blue. Within a week, Roberson took her to the pediatrician and to the emergency services at the hospital in Palestine, the Texas city where they lived. On January 31 of that year, the girl stopped breathing and her father took her to the health center again. He received a cardiac massage, which revived his heart, but not his brain. She was taken off the ventilator the next day. Her father became the main suspect after doctors performed a CT scan on the minor, where they found a swollen brain full of blood. They suspected child abuse.
“They accused me because I couldn’t explain what happened to him,” Roberson told NPR. The inmate is on the autism spectrum which had not been diagnosed at the time of the girl’s death and has a low IQ. The doctors at the hospital were the ones who called the police and accused him of Nikki’s death after the man showed no emotion. However, the lead detective on the case for the Palestine Police Department, Brian Wharton, admits that authorities never pursued any line of investigation other than shaken baby syndrome. Wharton, who has become an evangelical pastor, is one of Roberson’s defenders and believes the legal system failed.
Wharton is not the only one who believes this. Legislators Joe Moody and Jeff Leach, Democrats and Republicans respectively, are also leading a campaign to review the process that led to Roberson’s conviction. “For more than 20 years, Robert Roberson has spent 23 and a half hours of each day in solitary confinement in a cell as small as a Texan closet waiting to be heard,” they said.
Among the defenders of the prisoner is also John Grishambest-selling writer and anti-death penalty activist. He has argued that there are sufficient technological advances to allow a new diagnosis of Nikki’s death and not that of a syndrome that has become obsolete for modern science. Although the girl did have injuries to her skull that could have been caused by an assault, new evidence shows that the minor may have died from complications related to severe pneumonia.
The execution was to take place at 6:00 p.m. (Central United States Time). Roberson awaited his fate in a cell next to the room where he was to receive the lethal cocktail intravenously. The accused’s supporters were waiting for the word from Governor Greg Abbottwho has the authority to postpone death for about 30 days. But the president said nothing. He has only stopped a single execution in the almost 10 years he has led the local government. He has also not spoken publicly about the case despite the fact that Sonia Sotomayor, the judge of the federal Supreme Court, ordered him to temporarily stop the execution.
Roberson had asked for clemency from the state agency in charge of the prison system, which denied the motion. The six council members voted 6-0 not to transmute the death penalty into life imprisonment. The federal Supreme Court as the highest court in criminal matters refused to stop the execution. The word that has saved Roberson’s life for the moment came from a courtroom that rarely fails in criminal cases.
