A Texas prisoner who is facing execution having been sent to death row on the basis of “shaken baby syndrome”, a child abuse theory that has been widely debunked as junk science, has had his petition to the US supreme court denied.
The country’s highest court issued its denial on Monday morning giving no explanation. Robert Roberson, 56, who was sent to death row in 2003 for shaking his two-year-old daughter Nikki to death, had appealed to the justices to take another look at his case focusing on the largely discredited forensic science on which his conviction was secured.
The court’s decision leaves Roberson’s life in jeopardy. Having come within four days of execution in 2016, he has already exhausted appeals through Texas state courts and must now rely on the mercy of the Republican governor Greg Abbott who rarely grants clemency.
“Robert Roberson is an innocent father who has languished on Texas’s death row for 20 years for a crime that never occurred and a conviction based on outdated and now refuted science,” the prisoner’s lawyer, Gretchen Sween, said.
Sween added: “To lose a child is unimaginable. To be falsely convicted of harming that child is the stuff of nightmares.” Nikki died in hospital on 1 February 2002 after she fell into a comatose state in Roberson’s home in Palestine, Texas. Pediatric doctors detected symptoms including brain swelling which at the time were considered to be certain proof of child abuse and violent shaking.
Largely on the basis of that evidence, Roberson was sentenced to death.
In the intervening years, however, new evidence has been uncovered that suggests that not only is Roberson potentially innocent but that the crime for which he was convicted of never took place. Leading scientists have questioned the reliability of shaken baby syndrome, both as a medical diagnosis and as a forensic tool in criminal prosecutions, pointing to more than 80 alternative causes that can explain the symptoms without violence having occurred.
At least 32 people have been exonerated for crimes based on shaken baby syndrome forensics. Last month, an appeals court in New Jersey ruled that the theory was “junk science” and “scientifically unreliable”.
In Nikki’s case, several of the alternative causes that scientists have identified for the symptoms linked to shaken baby syndrome have been found to apply to the toddler. The girl had been ill with a fever of 104.5F (40.3C) shortly before she collapsed, had undiagnosed pneumonia, and had been given medical pills that are no longer considered safe for children as they can be life-threatening.
At his 2003 trial, Roberson was portrayed by prosecutors as a cold and calculating father who displayed no emotion. After his conviction, though, the inmate was diagnosed with autism which put those qualities in a completely different light. …
The reason why I say lock someone up for life rather than execute isn’t financial. It’s a matter of justice. New technology and new evidence can emerge that could be exculpatory. We convict innocent people with alarming regularity. Removing the death penalty to an extent prevents people from being killed (an irreversible punishment) rather than being confined. It’s not often a fair trade but I believe you can be compensated for your lost time if you were unjustly imprisoned. Don’t know how you’d compensate someone for killing them if you later find out you got it wrong.
And that’s absolutely a fair point. That’s why I mentioned wrongful convictions in my comment originally. I know there was a story about a guy in Oklahoma who has been on death row for something like 20 years but then evidence came out that he was innocent. I’m not even sure they released him from prison but they finally removed his death sentence.
Horrible situation, and that’s where I think we need reform in general because clearly our justice system has failed us in many ways.
My only counter is for situations like Timothy McVeigh, the home grown terrorist who bombed the Murrah building in OKC and killed 168 people and injured over 600, many of them being children due to parking his truck close to the daycare. It’s reactionary, sure, but a man like that committed an atrocity that was proven, he admitted to it, said he was justified in it, and ultimately was put to death for it. To me, that is justice for his crimes, but it’s also a very extreme example since most people aren’t home grown terrorists.
Again, I’m not saying I’m an expert or that I’m even right, hence why I even commented in the first place because I want other views. I do think that the death penalty should be used extremely rarely if it’s used at all, but I do still feel that there are some crimes in which the penalty is death. How do we ensure that we get it right though? That’s where you have a point and maybe we can’t so we shouldn’t.
I mean, society where I live had to explicitly decide whether it was more important to kill people who have a chance of being innocent or imprison people it thinks are bad for life, and they chose. I voted the other way, but that’s just because I’ve seen juries get it wrong a few too many times (my experience is almost entirely civil, so with that in mind, I’ve seen trials involving the police go the wrong way just because juries are uncomfortable finding against the police rather than that there are deficiencies in the case. It isn’t infuriating at all. The bribes we had to pay just for taking those cases…)