(Reuters) – A man in Texas is due on Thursday to become the first executed in the United States for murder attributed to shaken baby syndrome, despite his lawyers and many Texas lawmakers saying the conviction was based on faulty evidence.
Robert Roberson, 56, was convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, in 2002. The prosecution said he took her to hospital where scans showed that she had internal brain trauma of the sort that at the time was thought to indicate a baby had been violently shaken by someone.
In the days before her death, a doctor had diagnosed Nikki as having a viral infection and a fever, and Roberson has long said that on the morning of her death he found she had fallen out of bed.
Many lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives have questioned his conviction, and a House committee attempted to buy Roberson time by issuing a subpoena for him to testify before them next week.
The lead detective who helped secure Roberson’s conviction has since said he believes Roberson is innocent.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied Roberson’s bid for clemency on Wednesday. He has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a stay of execution.
In a response to Roberson’s Supreme Court petition, the Texas attorney general’s office said that Roberson had failed to prove his “actual innocence,” and that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had ruled that Nikki’s injuries were “inconsistent with a short fall from a bed or complications from a virus.”
Roberson’s lawyers told the Supreme Court that the medical theory used to convict Roberson in 2003 “has since been entirely discredited.”
“Not only was abuse presumed in 2003,” his lawyers wrote, “but Roberson’s blunted affect and aloof mannerisms, manifestations of his Autism Spectrum Disorder mistaken for a lack of care, led medical staff and law enforcement alike to presume culpability.”
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Sandra Maler)
