A bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers on Tuesday known as on Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles to cease the execution of a person convicted of killing his two-year-old daughter in 2002.
Robert Roberson is scheduled to be executed by deadly injection Oct. 17. Prosecutors claimed his daughter, Nikki Curtis, was killed after sustaining accidents brought on by being violently shaken.
The petition from 84 lawmakers from the 150-member state Home in addition to medical specialists, demise penalty attorneys, a former detective on the case and bestselling novelist John Grisham argue that the case was constructed on defective scientific proof in a uncommon exhibiting of widespread bipartisan help within the Lone Star State towards a deliberate execution, in keeping with The Related Press.
“There is a strong majority, a bipartisan majority, of the Texas House that have serious doubts about Robert Roberson’s execution,” Democrat Rep. Joe Moody mentioned at a press convention on the state Capitol. “This is one of those issues that is life and death, and our political ideology doesn’t come into play here.”
Robert Roberson III is scheduled to be executed by deadly injection Oct. 17. (Texas Division of Legal Justice by way of AP)
Texas regulation permits the governor to grant a one-time, 30-day reprieve from execution. However full clemency requires a advice from nearly all of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which is appointed by the governor.
Since Abbott was sworn into workplace in 2015, he has granted clemency in just one demise row case, when he commuted Thomas Whitaker’s demise sentence to life in jail an hour earlier than his scheduled execution in 2018. Whitaker had been convicted of arranging a plot that left his mom and brother fatally shot and his father wounded.
The lawmakers’ petition argues Roberson’s conviction was based mostly on inaccurate scientific proof and emphasizes that specialists have largely debunked allegations that Nikki’s signs had been according to shaken child syndrome.
“Nikki’s death … was not a crime — unless it is a crime for a parent to be unable to explain complex medical problems that even trained medical professionals failed to understand at the time,” the petition reads. “We know that Nikki’s lungs were severely infected and straining for oxygen — for days or even weeks before her collapse.”
Texas Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, speaks at a gathering of the Home Investigative Committee, June 9, 2022, on the state Capitol in Austin, Texas. (AP)
Roberson, who has maintained his innocence, took his daughter to the hospital in 2002 after he awoke and located her unconscious with blue on her lips. Docs on the time had been skeptical of Roberson’s declare that his daughter had fallen away from bed whereas they had been sleeping, with some testifying at trial that her signs had been according to the indicators of shaken child syndrome.
Many medical professionals now say that medical doctors diagnose shaken child syndrome too quickly earlier than making an allowance for a toddler’s medical historical past.
The medical specialists who signed on to the petition embrace these from Stanford College Medical Middle, the College of Pennsylvania and Youngsters’s Minnesota Hospital.
Roberson’s attorneys mentioned his demeanor was wrongfully used towards him, as he’s autistic, and that medical doctors did not rule out different medical explanations for the toddler’s signs, together with pneumonia.
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Texas Governor Greg Abbott makes an announcement on the way forward for the house business in Texas, at NASA’s Johnson House Middle in Houston, Texas, on March 26, 2024. ((Picture by SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP by way of Getty Photographs))
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The Texas Court docket of Legal Appeals beforehand halted his execution in 2016. Nevertheless, final yr the court docket allowed the case to renew, and a brand new date was set to hold out Roberson’s demise.
Prosecutors preserve that the proof towards Roberson stays sound and that the science of shaken child syndrome has not modified as a lot because the protection argued.
Brian Wharton, a former chief of detectives in Palestine, Texas, who helped in Roberson’s prosecution, signed the petition and publicly demanded that the state halt the execution.
“Knowing everything I know now, I am firmly convinced that Robert is innocent,” Wharton mentioned.
The Related Press contributed to this report.
