Texas court blocks execution of death row inmate Robert Roberson

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Texas’ highest criminal court on Thursday blocked Robert Roberson’s execution a week before it was set to take place, sending his case back to trial court.

Roberson was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for the death of his two-year-old daughter Nikki, who was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome. He has maintained his innocence over more than 20 years on death row, with his attorneys arguing that the science behind Nikki’s shaken baby diagnosis no longer held up. He was scheduled to be executed on Oct. 16, which would have made him the first person in U.S. history put to death in a shaken baby syndrome case.

After previously denying his recent appeals, largely on procedural grounds, a 5-4 majority of the all-Republican Court of Criminal Appeals granted Roberson’s request for a stay of execution under Texas’ groundbreaking 2013 junk science law, which provides for a second look when the science driving a conviction has since been debunked. The law has never been successfully used to secure a new trial for a death row inmate, though Roberson could be the first if the trial court in Anderson County recommends that the evidence warrants one and the high court agrees.

In its order, the Court of Criminal Appeals cited its decision last year to overturn the shaken baby conviction of Dallas County man Andrew Roark, based on the evolving medical research on shaken baby diagnoses. The court exonerated Roark — in a case Roberson’s attorneys called “materially indistinguishable” from that of their client — a week before rejecting Roberson’s appeal on procedural grounds.

“That’s the insight we have today: There were enough members of the court who are troubled by the inconsistency between granting relief under [the junk science law] to Andrew Roark, but then denying it a week later to Robert Roberson,” Gretchen Sween, Roberson’s attorney, said in a press conference Thursday. “Roark changed the legal landscape in Texas, and should mean relief for Robert.”

The Court of Criminal Appeals did not decide on the merits of Roberson’s appeals, instead directing the trial court to consider whether he should be granted a new trial in light of the Roark decision. The court dismissed on procedural grounds Roberson’s other appeals claiming judicial misconduct in his trial and his actual innocence.

“There is a delicate balance and tension in our criminal justice system between the finality of judgment and its accuracy based on our ever-advancing scientific understanding,” Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Bert Richardson wrote in a concurring opinion. “A death sentence is clearly final and, once carried out, hindsight is useless.”

In his most recent appeals, Roberson’s attorneys presented fresh medical and expert opinions that concluded Nikki died of natural and accidental causes, echoing forensic input presented in his earlier filings.

Experts found that Nikki had undiagnosed chronic pneumonia and was prescribed medications no longer given to toddlers her age. Those medications suppressed her breathing, which led to brain swelling, according to those experts. Her condition devolved into sepsis, causing a bleeding disorder that made her bruise easily.

“None of these circumstances were identified or even considered, let alone excluded, in assessing her condition,” Roberson’s attorneys wrote, adding that the “discredited and unreliable forensic science” underpinning his conviction could only mean one thing: “There was no homicide, only the tragic death of his very ill little girl.”

In a statement Thursday, Sween said she was “confident that an objective review of the science and medical evidence will show there was no crime.”

“Robert adored Nikki, whose death was a tragedy, a horror compounded by Robert’s wrongful conviction that devastated his whole family,” she said.

Roberson’s conviction became the subject of a political firestorm, with a bipartisan group of lawmakers and advocates fighting for him to get a new trial and another group of Republicans, including Attorney General Ken Paxton, who now represents the state in Roberson’s case, clamoring for his execution.

“While the system has failed Robert and Nikki at every turn, today, with this action by the court, truth and justice finally win the day,” said Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Allen and a lead advocate for Roberson who visited him on death row with a handful of other lawmakers Wednesday. “Going forward, we are hopeful and expectant that Robert’s story, and the truth about what happened to Nikki, will fully and finally see the light of day in the trial court, which is what we’ve been asking for and working for all along.”

Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, commended the judges who “took their duty to seek justice seriously, even in the face of tremendous — and dishonest — political pressure to execute a potentially innocent person, who has never been given a fair trial.”

Roberson’s execution was delayed last year after a Texas House committee subpoenaed him the day before he was set to be put to death, in a last-ditch gambit to buy him more time. The subpoena deepened a sharp political clash between the state’s elected leaders and prompted the Texas Supreme Court to step in with an order temporarily delaying the execution.

Texas lawmakers had argued the courts were not properly applying the junk science law, which Roberson had repeatedly tried to use to overturn his conviction. A bill to bolster the law overwhelmingly passed the House earlier this year but died in the Senate.

In a dissenting opinion Thursday, Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Gina Parker argued that Roberson’s case was “not a ‘shaken baby’ case,” citing trial testimony describing Nikki’s injuries and arguing that “the obvious conclusion to draw is that the child was beaten to death.”

“I am disappointed and dismayed that 5 judges on our Court of Criminal Appeals could read the trial court’s record and extend this relief,” Rep. Mitch Little, R-Lewisville and a vocal proponent of preserving Roberson’s death sentence, said in a statement. “I fully expect his conviction to be upheld in the trial court based on the evidentiary record and put us right back where we started.”

Some Republican lawmakers, in addition to Paxton and the Anderson County prosecutor, had insisted that the evidence of Roberson’s guilt was still convincing and sought to downplay the centrality of Nikki’s shaken baby diagnosis to the state’s case.

But the push to uphold Roberson’s death sentence, including a graphic press release Paxton published last year, often relied on a sometimes misleading and incomplete presentation of Roberson’s trial record and the evidence he later presented in his appeals.

Sween said on Thursday that she had reached out to the Office of the Attorney General asking if it would continue representing the state in Roberson’s case. Its takeover of the case in June from the Anderson County district attorney, who had handled it since Roberson’s execution was stayed in 2016, was unprecedented, Sween argued. She noted that the OAG usually handles civil matters, and typically only steps in on criminal cases when the local prosecutor lacks the resources or expertise to handle a particular case.

The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Court of Criminal Appeals had previously halted Roberson’s execution in 2016 based on the junk science law, sending it back to the trial court in Anderson County for further consideration. The trial court later declined to grant him a new trial, and the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed in 2023 that doubt around the cause of Nikki’s death was not enough to overturn his death sentence. Roberson’s attorneys argued at the time that the state and the courts had not meaningfully considered the reams of new evidence undermining Nikki’s shaken baby diagnosis.

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