Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson filed a new appeal with the state’s highest criminal court on Wednesday in his first attempt to overturn his death sentence since an unprecedented intervention by a state legislative committee delayed his execution in October.
Roberson was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for the death of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki, who was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome. He has maintained his innocence during his 22 years on death row, arguing that new scientific evidence discredits prosecutors’ shaken baby theory and shows that she died of natural and accidental causes.
The appeal, which was first reported by the Austin American-Statesman, includes new expert opinions finding that the shaken baby diagnosis was unsound and that Nikki’s autopsy that ruled her death a homicide was flawed. Those conclusions echo medical and forensic opinions presented in Roberson’s previous appeals.
“This Subsequent Application is supported by additional new evidence establishing that Roberson’s conviction was based on discredited and unreliable forensic science and that he is actually innocent,” Roberson’s attorneys wrote. “There was no homicide, only the tragic death of his very ill little girl.”
Wednesday’s filing also cited the court’s decision in October to overturn the conviction of another man in a shaken baby case out of Dallas County, which recognized that the scientific consensus around shaken baby diagnoses had changed over the last two decades. Roberson’s attorneys called that case “materially indistinguishable” from Roberson’s.
The appeal also argued that Texas lawmakers had made clear over the last several months that they did not believe the courts were properly applying the state’s junk science law, which Roberson has repeatedly tried to use to prove his innocence. That law provides for new trials when the science at the crux of a case has changed.
Roberson’s attorneys argued in the appeal that “no rational juror would find Roberson guilty of capital murder,” and that “unreliable and outdated scientific and medical evidence was material to his conviction.”
The arguments raised in Wednesday’s appeal align with the case Roberson’s attorneys have presented in his appeals since 2016.
See here for the last update. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but it really does amaze me how little the biggest proponents of the death penalty care about the correctness of death penalty verdicts. The thought of an innocent person possibly being executed just doesn’t bother them, as long as they can say that they got a “fair trial” and that all of the (arbitrarily restricted) avenues of appeal have been exhausted. They’re consistent about that whether it’s a case where the actual bad guy has seemingly gotten away with it or it’s a case like this one or that of Cameron Willingham where the evidence shows that no actual crime occurred. The science has advanced greatly since 2016, which is why the Lege had previously intervened in this case. We’ll see if the courts can get it right this time around.