'Texans should be outraged': Execution back on for inmate who has strong innocence claims
A Texas judge has rescheduled the execution of a death row inmate who won a rare stay of execution last year as prison officials were poised to administer his lethal injection.
Judge Austin Reeve Jackson on Wednesday set Robert Roberson's execution for Oct. 16, almost exactly a year after the Texas Supreme Court granted him a stay on his last execution day, Oct. 17, 2024.
Roberson, 58, is imprisoned in the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, despite strong evidence that suggests he is innocent. Roberson was convicted based on shaken baby syndrome, which has since been largely debunked.
Last year with hours left to live, Roberson's life was spared following a furious effort by a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers − a development rarely seen in the nation's most prolific death penalty state. The Texas Supreme Court intervened even as the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to recommend clemency for Roberson and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop it.
Judge Reeve has rescheduled the execution at the request of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton even though the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is "currently considering new evidence further proving" Roberson's innocence, said his defense attorney, Gretchen Sween.
'Texans should be outraged that the court has scheduled an execution date for a demonstrably innocent man," Sween said in a statement. "Everyone who has taken the time to look at the evidence of Robert Roberson's innocence − including the lead detective, one of the jurors, a range of highly qualified experts, and a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers − has reached the same conclusion: Nikki's death was a terrible tragedy. Robert did not kill her. There was no crime."
The Attorney General's Office didn't immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment Wednesday.
Here's what you need to know about the case.
Detective who pursued Robert Roberson: 'I was wrong'
Roberson was convicted of killing his daughter in their home in the East Texas city of Palestine in 2002.
Roberson reported hearing Nikki cry and finding that she had fallen out of bed. After soothing her, he said, they both went back to sleep. Later, when Roberson woke again, he found Nikki wasn't breathing, and her lips had turned blue. At the emergency room, doctors observed symptoms consistent with brain death and she was pronounced dead the next day.
Doctors and investigators at the time jumped to the conclusion that Nikki died of shaken baby syndrome, but the toddler had pneumonia in both lungs, pre-existing conditions for which she was prescribed opioids now banned for children, and undiagnosed sepsis.
Shaken baby syndrome has been largely debunked as junk science, and the lead investigator in Roberson's case told USA TODAY's The Excerpt podcast that he botched the investigation.
"Robert is a completely innocent man and we got it completely wrong, because we were looking for the wrong things," Brian Wharton said, adding that his confirmation bias and a number of misunderstandings wrongly pointed him to Roberson's guilt.
"I was wrong. I didn't see Robert. I did not hear Robert," Wharton said. "I can tell you now, he is a good man. He is a kind man. He is a gracious man. And he did not do what the state of Texas and I have accused him of."
What led to Robert Roberson's previous execution stay?
Five Republican and four Democratic lawmakers on the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued a subpoena for Roberson shortly before his execution last year in an extraordinary effort to stop it.
Texas Reps. Joe Moody, a Democrat, and Jeff Leach, a Republican, led the charge for Roberson's reprieve and issued a statement after his life was spared.
"For over 20 years, Robert Roberson has spent 23.5 hours of every single day in solitary confinement in a cell no bigger than the closets of most Texans, longing and striving to be heard," they said. "And while some courthouses may have failed him, the Texas House has not."
The move came after a failed effort by a bipartisan group of 84 Texas lawmakers who urged the state's Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend clemency for Roberson "out of grave concern that Texas may put him to death for a crime that did not occur.'
The clemency board denied their request.
About three dozen scientific and medical experts wrote to the clemency board explaining that had Nikki died today, "no doctor would consider Shaken Baby Syndrome" as the cause because the condition "is now considered a diagnosis of exclusion."
"Nikki's pneumonia, the extreme levels of dangerous medications found in her system during her autopsy, and her fall from the bed explain why Nikki died," the experts wrote.
Also fighting for Roberson's salvation: groups representing parental rights, autism advocates, faith leaders and anti-death penalty groups including the Innocence Project, and bestselling author John Grisham, who called Nikki's death "a tragedy, not a crime," in a column for the Palestine Herald-Press.
What happens now?
Roberson's attorney told USA TODAY that she will again seek a stay of Roberson's execution "so all of the evidence that proves he is innocent can be reviewed by the courts without the pressure of a looming execution date.'
Roberson will have many chances for courts, the state's clemency board and government officials to stop his execution again.
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