PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Mr. Roberson’s trial was riddled with unfairness and errors. One doctor’s preliminary hunch about Shaken Baby Syndrome was used to arrest Mr. Roberson, even before the autopsy was performed. (Petition at p. 8.) His own trial lawyer agreed with the prosecution that Nikki’s death was a shaken baby case and argued only that Mr. Roberson lacked intent to kill. (Petition at p. 9.) The State elicited testimony from a nurse who claimed that she had seen evidence of sexual abuse and offered her views of pedophiles. After the jury was poisoned by this inflammatory testimony, the State dropped the charge of capital murder based on the sexual assault allegation. Yet the State continued to argue that the jury should consider the nurse’s unsubstantiated opinions."
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RELEASE: "Discredited Shaken Baby Syndrome Keeps Innocent Father on Texas’ Death Row (Robert Roberson Cert Petition Filed Today (May 11. 2023).
GIST: "Robert Roberson, a Special Education student when he dropped out of the 9th grade and a person with autism spectrum disorder, is an innocent father who has spent 20 years on death row in Texas for a crime that never occurred. In 2002, Mr. Roberson’s two-year old, chronically ill daughter, Nikki, was sick with a high fever and suffered a short fall from bed. Hospital staff did not know Mr. Roberson had autism and judged his response to his daughter’s grave condition as lacking emotion. Mr. Roberson was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to death under the now-discredited Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS).
Today, attorneys for Mr. Roberson filed a petition for certiorari asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the decision of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), which has disregarded unrebutted new scientific and medical evidence debunking Shaken Baby Syndrome and showing that his daughter died of natural and accidental causes. There was no crime.
Robert Roberson’s Petition for Certiorari can be viewed here and Appendix here.
Mr. Roberson’s petition states:
To address the layers of due process violations below, Petitioner respectfully asks that the Court issue a writ of certiorari and undertake plenary review or summarily reverse the judgment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA). Petitioner pursued this subsequent state habeas proceeding after Texas enacted a new forensic science writ statute specifically intended to address wrongful convictions based on discredited science. In this proceeding, Petitioner established that:
(1) the State relied on an uncontested SBS causation theory to obtain his conviction;
(2) each of the SBS premises considered medical orthodoxy in 2003 have since been undermined by evidence-based science;
(3) the jury heard misleading, highly prejudicial testimony from one nurse suggesting that Nikki was sexually abused, when no one else saw any signs of such abuse; and
(4) the combination of Nikki’s undiagnosed pneumonia, medications prescribed to her, and an accidental fall entirely explain Nikki’s condition. But the little the jury heard about Nikki’s medical history was dismissed as irrelevant; the jury did not hear about her severe pneumonia, only identified during recent re-investigation of the autopsy. Nor did they hear about the lethal quantities of respiratory-suppressing prescription drugs in her system at the time of her collapse.
Yet Texas courts disregarded all of Petitioner’s new evidence and denied him a new trial, leaving him on death row without any obvious recourse beyond this Court’s intervention. (Petition at p. 1.)
As Mr. Roberson’s petition explains, in 2002, the consensus in the medical community was that a child must have been violently shaken, and possibly struck against a blunt surface, whenever a child had the triad of symptoms observed in Nikki: bleeding under the dura membrane and outside of the brain; brain swelling; and bleeding in the eyes. The consensus in the medical community at that time was that naturally occurring illnesses or short falls with an impact to the head could not cause this triad of symptoms. (Petition at p. i.)
The medical consensus also presumed that whoever had been caring for the child when she lost consciousness must have been the culprit because violent shaking caused immediate brain damage. Mr. Roberson’s petition states: “Caregivers, like Robert, who denied doing anything to hurt the child, were perceived as callous liars.” (Petition at p. i.) None of these SBS principles were grounded in science and, long after Mr. Roberson’s trial, each has been debunked.
Mr. Roberson’s trial was riddled with unfairness and errors. One doctor’s preliminary hunch about Shaken Baby Syndrome was used to arrest Mr. Roberson, even before the autopsy was performed. (Petition at p. 8.) His own trial lawyer agreed with the prosecution that Nikki’s death was a shaken baby case and argued only that Mr. Roberson lacked intent to kill. (Petition at p. 9.) The State elicited testimony from a nurse who claimed that she had seen evidence of sexual abuse and offered her views of pedophiles. After the jury was poisoned by this inflammatory testimony, the State dropped the charge of capital murder based on the sexual assault allegation. Yet the State continued to argue that the jury should consider the nurse’s unsubstantiated opinions. (Petition at pp. 10, 13.)
In 2016, a week before Mr. Roberson’s scheduled execution date, the CCA stayed Mr. Roberson’s execution, relying in part on a new Texas law permitting legal challenges based on changes in science used to obtain convictions and death sentences. The CCA sent Mr. Roberson’s case back to the trial court, which conducted a nine-day evidentiary hearing in 2021. Mr. Roberson’s experts explained that Shaken Baby Syndrome has been discredited and provided compelling evidence that Nikki died of natural and accidental causes, not abuse. Mr. Roberson submitted to the court a 302-page proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law that comprehensively summarized the new evidence from six expert witnesses from an array of disciplines. (Petition at pp. 14-24.)
The trial court rubberstamped the prosecution’s 17-page proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, which barely mentioned Mr. Roberson’s new scientific evidence and relied almost exclusively on the outdated scientific evidence introduced at the 2003 trial.
On January 11, 2023, the CCA rejected Mr. Roberson’s claims in a short opinion without mentioning any of the voluminous new evidence. (Petition at pp. 23-24, 33-39.) The State has not sought a new execution date for Mr. Roberson."
The entire release can be read at: edit
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
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