Attorneys for an East Texas man scheduled to be put to death this fall filed a motion Thursday asking the state’s highest criminal court to stay the order, protesting the use of foundational evidence prosecutors used — and which courts have affirmed on subsequent appeals — to secure the conviction.
In 2003, an Anderson County jury convicted Robert Roberson III of capital murder in connection to the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki. Court records show prosecutors relied in part on testimony from doctors and evidence indicating Nikki died from shaken baby syndrome — a conclusion Roberson’s attorneys argue was based on “junk science” and “false, misleading and scientifically invalid testimony.”
The former Palestine construction worker had faced a 2016 execution date, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the date after hearing arguments from his lawyers. The convicting court and the appeals court have since reaffirmed the conviction and denied requests for a new trial, leading to a judge to reset an execution date last month.
Roberson, 57, is now scheduled to die by lethal injection Oct. 17 in Huntsville.
The Thursday filings in an Anderson County state district court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appealsecho previous arguments from Roberson’s attorneys while highlighting new evidence they say shows Nikki, who was chronically ill, died from pneumonia that progressed to the point of sepsis. Gretchen Sween, one of Roberson’s attorneys, said Thursday that the evidence shows Nikki died of natural and accidental causes rather than homicide.
“Robert did not harm Nikki in any way. There was no crime — only the tragic natural death of a little girl,” the attorneys wrote in a 143-page filing asking for the dismissal of the conviction on constitutional grounds.
Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell did not respond to messages seeking comment on the filing. She was not the district attorney when Roberson’s case went to trial but has since pursued the setting of an execution date, including after the initial 2016 execution date was stayed, court records show.
Reached by The Dallas Morning News on Thursday, Douglas Lowe, who was the county’s district attorney when Roberson’s case went to trial but has since had no involvement in it, highlighted how the conviction has held despite a number of appeals. He deferred further questions to Mitchell’s office.
The Thursday filings draw largely on opinions solicited by Roberson’s attorneys from three people: a lung pathology specialist, an expert in medical toxicology and emergency room medicine, and a pediatric radiologist.
Taken together, the analyses, which attorneys say could have only been developed after the 2003 trial because of evolving science, show Nikki died a natural death. Their opinions questioning the initial conclusions presented at trial merit the conviction being overturned, according to the filing.
After Nikki died Feb. 1, 2002, a medical examiner ruled the death as a homicide and attributed the cause to blunt-force head injuries. Physicians who examined her said bruises to her chin, cheek and jaw and a subdural hematoma — bleeding outside her brain but inside her skull — were likely intentional, court records show.
The shaken baby syndrome diagnosis was made by a child abuse expert at Children’s Medical Center Dallas, where Nikki had been transported. Shaken baby syndrome, also called abusive head trauma, is a serious brain injury caused by the forceful shaking of an infant or toddler that destroys brain cells and prevents them from getting enough oxygen, according to the Mayo Clinic.
After the appeals court remanded the case back to the convicting court in 2016, Anderson County district Judge Deborah Oakes Evans affirmed the conviction in February 2022 and denied the request to toss the case. The judge said criticisms of shaken baby syndrome were known at the time of the trial and were not challenged, but that, had they been, the trial would have had the same outcome.
“The Court, however, finds by a preponderance of evidence that had the scientific evidence been presented at trial [Roberson] would still have been convicted,” Evans wrote in the February 2022 finding of fact.
In the years since the trial, the three primary signs used to diagnose the syndrome have gone from “medical gospel” to questionable by the broader medical community, according to the filing by Roberson’s attorneys. Questions about the diagnoses have convinced Brian Wharton, a former Palestine detective who testified for the state against Roberson, that Nikki died of accidental and natural causes.
“For 20 years, I have thought that something went very wrong in Roberson’s case and feared that justice was not served,” Wharton wrote in a May column published in The News. “If there is no movement to correct this injustice, I fear myself and others will carry our guilt eternally.”
The shifting consensus around those signs has led to some convictions being overturned. Across the U.S., more than 30 people who served time in prison after convictions involving shaken baby syndrome have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
One of those exonerations — a child abuse case out of Harris County from 2000 — was in Texas, the database shows.