Why Texas Lawmakers Tried To Stop America's First 'Shaken Baby Syndrome' Execution
Robert Roberson was sentenced to death based on outdated and largely discredited scientific evidence.
Last fall, an extraordinary legal drama played out in Texas that shook the foundations of the death penalty in a state that still stands for hang-'em-high justice.
Hours before he was scheduled to become the first person in the country to be executed based on evidence of what used to be called "shaken baby syndrome," Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson was granted an unprecedented reprieve when a state House committee subpoenaed him to testify before it.
Roberson did not testify because the committee and the Texas Department of Corrections couldn't agree on the logistics. In November, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that a legislative subpoena couldn't halt the execution. When this issue went to press, a new execution date had not been set for Roberson. But the unusual legislative intervention and the high-stakes fight among the branches of Texas' government showed major, bipartisan doubts about the integrity of the death penalty.
Roberson was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 for murdering his 2-year-old daughter. A jury convicted him based largely on expert findings of shaken baby syndrome, which is now called abusive head trauma (AHT). Roberson claimed his daughter, who had been in and out of the emergency room in recent days because of illness, had fallen out of bed. Doctors and prosecutors said Roberson's daughter died of brain trauma caused by whiplash.
The scientific consensus surrounding AHT has shifted considerably in the decades since Roberson's conviction. The classic trio of symptoms used to identify AHT at the time of Roberson's trial are now known to be caused by other possible conditions besides trauma. Roberson's attorneys argue that the forensic testimony at his original trial has been discredited both by advances in science and by previously unreleased autopsy records showing Roberson's daughter died of severe pneumonia.
Prosecutors and pediatric abuse specialists say there's broad scientific consensus around AHT, but innocence groups have convinced several state courts otherwise. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, at least 34 parents and caregivers in 18 states convicted based on AHT evidence have been exonerated. In 2022, a New Jersey trial court judge barred AHT evidence from a trial, writing that it's "an assumption packaged as a medical diagnosis, unsupported by any medical or scientific testing." A state appeals court upheld the ruling, writing that "the very basis of the theory has never been proven."
Texas prosecutors and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott argue that Roberson was convicted based on evidence of AHT and multiple blunt impacts. Roberson's supporters counter that Abbott and the state's narrative misrepresents the trial record—there were findings of only one impact site, consistent with Roberson's story that his daughter fell out of bed—and understates how essential the expert witness testimony on shaken baby syndrome was to his conviction.
"Everything that was presented to us was all about shaken baby syndrome," Terre Compton, one of the jurors who convicted and sentenced Roberson, testified before the Texas Legislature on October 21. "That was what our decision was based on. Nothing else was ever mentioned or presented to us to consider."
Texas lawmakers are interested in Roberson's case not just because of his innocence claims, but because they passed a law in 2013 that was supposed to give defendants who were convicted based on discredited forensic science an avenue for relief. To date, not one capital defendant has successfully used this so-called junk science writ to overturn a conviction. Texas lawmakers and legal experts say state courts are misinterpreting the law and applying higher standards to review than they ought to.
This summer the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), the state's highest criminal court, dismissed Roberson's last-ditch round of petitions without considering them on the merits, even as it overturned a conviction in another AHT case that featured testimony from one of the same expert witnesses who appeared in Roberson's trial.
Part of the reason Abbott and the CCA are fighting so hard to see Roberson executed is that Texas is one of the states that imposes the death penalty the most. If moral and legal certainty in the death penalty can't survive in Texas, it won't survive much longer anywhere else. And for some state officials, that is a more worrying thought than the possibility of an innocent man being executed.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "The Case of Robert Roberson."
