Exclusive: A Texas death row inmate is scheduled to be executed next week after being found guilty of murdering his 2-year-old daughter in 2002, but his lawyer insists not only is his client innocent, but also who is responsible for the girl's death. He claims that there is no such thing.
Robert Roberson is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on October 17th. Prosecutors said his daughter Nikki Curtis died after sustaining injuries from being violently shaken, an injury known as “shaken baby syndrome.” Roberson will be the first person to be executed in the United States based on shaken baby syndrome.
More than 80 Texas state legislators, detectives who assisted prosecutors, medical experts, parental rights groups, human rights groups, best-selling novelist John Grisham and other advocates say Mr. Roberson is a criminal. They are asking the state to grant leniency for their convictions. Innocent. A group of state legislators also visited the prison to encourage him.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, longtime attorney Gretchen Sween debunked the shaken baby syndrome fallacy and revealed that Nicki's actual cause of death was a lung infection and other causes such as pneumonia. He said it was determined to be due to a health issue.
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Robert Roberson is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on October 17th. (Roberson family)
Roberson, who has always maintained her innocence, took her daughter to the hospital in 2002 and found her unconscious with blue lips when she woke up. Doctors at the time were skeptical of Roberson's claims that her daughter had fallen out of bed while she was sleeping, and one doctor testified at trial that her daughter's symptoms were consistent with signs of shaken baby syndrome.
“I believe he is innocent for two distinct reasons,” Sween told FOX News Digital. “The theory that there was a crime that was used to convict him, then known as the shaken baby syndrome hypothesis, has been completely discredited.” No one now says 'as if it were a scientific fact. ”
“I also know from experts who have dug into my daughter's medical records and reviewed the evidence that this seriously ill child died from undiagnosed pneumonia. [ravaging] Her lungs were combined with extremely dangerous prescription drugs administered in the last days of her life,” she continued, “and suggests that doctors did this on purpose. They just didn't know about pneumonia.”
She said doctors monitored Nikki's symptoms and thought they were indicative of a cold or flu, so they put her on antihistamines and codeine to suppress breathing.
“Pneumonia is a disease of the lungs,” Sween said. “The child who was given these drugs had trouble breathing and collapsed in the middle of the night and stopped breathing. We now know what happened to this child, and we know what the state said 20-odd years ago. I know that's not true at all.”
Many medical experts, including those at Stanford University Medical Center, the University of Pennsylvania, and Children's Hospital of Minnesota, now say that doctors are too quick to diagnose shaken baby syndrome before considering a child's medical history.
Sween said it was “frustrating” that she believed there was “overwhelming” and “compelling” evidence that the court had not yet examined.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals blocked Roberson's execution in 2016, but last year the court allowed the case to reopen and a new execution date was set.
On Monday, Roberson's lawyers asked a Texas court to halt Roberson's execution and reconsider his innocence based on new scientific evidence. His lawyers also asked the court based on new evidence that further shows that a landmark state law aimed at preventing wrongful convictions was not applied as intended in his case. , asked that the denial of habeas corpus be reconsidered.
Sween said he intends to file as many appeals as possible, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, to save his client's life.
Texas law allows the governor to grant a one-time 30-day suspended sentence. However, a full pardon requires a recommendation from a majority of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which is appointed by the governor.
Robert Roberson III was convicted of murdering his 2-year-old daughter in 2002. (Texas Department of Criminal Justice, via Associated Press)
Since taking office in 2015, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has granted clemency in just one death row case, commuting Thomas Whitaker's sentence to life in prison in 2018, an hour before he was scheduled to be executed. Whittaker was previously convicted of wanted. The plot left his mother and brother shot dead and his father injured.
But Sween said Roberson's case is different from previous death penalty cases because it is an “actual innocence case” in which Roberson was not only wrongly accused, but there was no crime at all. It is called the body.
“If that doesn't amount to an exercise of executive power, I don't know what does,” Sween said.
Abbott's office and the Board of Pardons and Paroles did not respond to Fox News Digital's requests for comment.
Prosecutors argue that the evidence against Roberson remains sound and that the science of shaken baby syndrome has not changed as much as the defense claims.
“That's completely indefensible,” Sween said of the prosecution's argument that the science hasn't changed. She also points out that the American Academy of Pediatrics, which she claims is responsible for making shaken baby syndrome so widely known, has ruled out in its current consensus statement that all other possible causes of the same condition have been ruled out. He also noted that abuse should not be diagnosed until it has been diagnosed.
She also said there is no evidence that tremors caused Nikki's symptoms and cited multiple studies showing there are several other possible explanations for the child's death. He also pointed to research that has never shown that tremors can cause internal bleeding or brain damage outside the brain.
Sween also pointed out that 2-year-old Nikki is not a baby and that a 2-year-old's anatomy is different from that of a baby.
Shaken baby syndrome was theorized several years ago as a possible explanation for the mysterious deaths of infants with internal head disease, subdural hemorrhage, brain swelling, and in some cases retinal hemorrhage. I did. But Sween claims this theory was never tested and was still treated as established fact.
“We now know that all of these conditions can cause the same symptoms,” she says. “So how can something like pneumonia be diagnosed as abuse when it can cause the same internal disease? So, with all due respect, the state is simply wrong on this point. I think so.”
Mr. Sween also cited a similar case that was tried in another part of Texas several years before Mr. Roberson's case. In the Dallas case, which featured the same child abuse experts used in Roberson's case in Palestine, Texas, prosecutors representing the state acknowledged the change in science and awarded the man a new trial. Agreed it was worth it.
Mr. Roberson's lawyers also claim that because Mr. Roberson is autistic, his behavior was unfairly used against him. He didn't look like a distraught parent, but Sween says that may be due to his autism.
“It all started when he took the child to the hospital,” Sween said. “She was in a coma. He didn't know how to explain her condition. His attitude from the beginning was judged to be just strange, unnatural, strange. All this. A judgment was made and later became part of the trial testimony. Several witnesses told the jury that this was reason to suspect his disrespectful behavior, but not surprisingly, these doctors and nurses. , none of the police knew Robert was autistic.
Sween says that as part of autism, people often shut down during emotional crises and don't express what they're feeling inside. She said that's the case with Roberson, who wasn't diagnosed with autism until 2018.
“And that was his symptom and it remained that way. But there was even mention of this in his records long before anything like this happened to Nikki,” she said. “But he never got a proper diagnosis. You know, he was a special needs kid, a poor kid, lived on the outskirts of town, and didn't get any help through Medicaid. He was placed in a special needs class, which he was never.'' A thorough diagnosis was performed and tests were performed to figure out what was going on. ”
Sween said Roberson said the outpouring of support from various people and organizations who believed he was innocent had made a difference for him, and Roberson had long believed he was innocent. He said that he didn't feel “as a human being” as he had done before. State legislators visited him and expressed solidarity with him.
Texas Senate Bill 1578, passed in 2021, allows parents accused of child abuse by medical professionals to seek a second opinion from an independent physician who specializes in the child's specific medical condition. However, Roberson never benefited from this law because it was enacted almost 20 years after his conviction.
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Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has granted only one pardon for a death row inmate since he took office in 2015. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
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Sween also said that Roberson's case is a controversial issue among those who support the death penalty, given “irrefutable evidence from experts with decades of experience pointing to pneumonia in this child's lungs.” But he said it should raise concerns about the death penalty.
“If the courts can't hear that and that's a reason to kill someone, I think it's going to be hard to have confidence that Texas isn't frequently at risk of executing innocent people,” she said. Ta. “And I don't know anyone who would take the moral position that it's somehow legal to execute people for crimes that didn't happen.”
As for Roberson's state of mind ahead of his scheduled execution, Sween said he seems to be torn between being afraid and happy that people are worried about the case.
“Every time he learns that there are new people interested in this case, he gets a childlike enthusiasm and feels hopeful again,” she said. “So, that's kind of a byproduct of his disability. And one of the things that I think helped him was that you told him, you know, we still have things to strive for and things to do. When you tell him he's staying, he becomes optimistic again. So he doesn't.'' I won't go into complicated philosophical thinking about this, but I understand why he hasn't gone home yet. I haven't. ”
