“What caused the internal bleeding was from the fact that she stopped breathing and she stopped breathing because she was very sick and had pneumonia and stopped breathing and they were giving her all these drugs that suppressed breathing. There is no sign of violence on her. You can’t beat someone and not leave marks. They looked at the interior blood, from two days later, after she had all this stuff pumped into her system and all the blood that couldn’t go into her brain because she was brain dead, sadly, and they see blood, and they think trauma, but (that’s) not the way it works and the brain expert made this very clear in our proceedings.”
Gretchen Sween, Roberson’s attorney, filed the motion and exhibits April 10 in response to her concerns that Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell intends to seek an execution date for Roberson. Sween said she will be seeking a new trial for Roberson.
Mitchell confirmed she will be setting an execution date at some point.
"Our job, in the Office of the District Attorney, is to follow the rule of law," she said. "The law says that after all appeals are exhausted we are to set a date for execution."
It will be up to Judge Deborah Oakes Evans to approve the date, Mitchell said.
Roberson was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2003 in Anderson County for killing his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis. Roberson has long maintained he does not understand what happened to his daughter and he had no intent to harm her or cause her death.
The case has drawn national attention from people and organizations questioning whether there was even a murder, or whether the death of the child was accidental.
“The way state law works, the sole authority to ask for an execution date lies with the local DA,” Sween said. “She doesn’t have to ask for it, but she has made it clear that is her plan, which is why I filed that motion.”
Her motion asks for a hearing before any execution date is set, and points to the recent exoneration of an Ohio man, Alan Butts, who was tried the same year as Roberson (2003). His case, like Roberson’s, was based on the same “shaken baby” child abuse theory. In Butts’ case, a toddler - the same age as Roberson’s daughter - had undiagnosed pneumonia, just like Roberson’s daughter. That pneumonia was missed during the autopsy, as it was with Roberson’s daughter, and both girls’ physical conditions were misinterpreted as being caused by shaking and trauma. In 2022 - after Roberson’s last hearing - an Ohio court ruled that Butts should get a new trial.
Sween said that as of this month, because of the new science, Ohio decided not to prosecute Butts again and he has been exonerated.
“The Ohio court’s decision was based on opinions, reports and testimony provided by some of the same experts who testified regarding Mr. Roberson’s wrongful conviction,” Sween said. “The current motion notes the recent trend across the country that should apply equally to Mr. Roberson here in Anderson County. Executing him for a crime that did not occur would be a grave miscarriage of justice.”
Sween said there is a plan to bring another appeal based on yet more new scientific developments and new legal cases, and once filed, that becomes a reason to withdraw an execution date.
Sween said when she approached Mitchell about foregoing setting a date for execution, because there was a clear plan to file another appeal based on yet more new evidence that Nikki’s death was not a homicide, Sween said Mitchell told her she was not interested in waiting.
Mitchell said she has not spoken with Sween and there has been no prior discussion between the two attorneys with regard to setting a date. She did say Sween did email her, and asked her not to set a date.
“The way it works is, we get a date from the Attorney General’s Office after all appeals are exhausted,” Mitchell said. “The AG also sends the proper paperwork to file. Ultimately, the judge has the final word.”
“My hope is that the larger community can learn about this case and see why the national Innocence Project, numerous doctors and scientists, former federal judges, and many others believe that a miscarriage of justice has occurred here. There was no crime - let alone a murder,” Sween said.
Sween said the goal is to get a new trial for Roberson.
“All we are asking for now is a chance to have a new trial because the trial record shows that information was presented as ‘facts’ to the jury that no doctor, even these child abuse experts, would support today — such as the idea that the child’s very serious health issues did not need to be considered,” Sween said. “Back then, doctors were taught that, where there was a set of three internal conditions, they could simply assume that abuse, through violent shaking and impact, had occurred. Today, actual scientific inquiry has established that those same three conditions — subdural bleeding, brain swelling, and bleeding into the eyes — are associated with a range of naturally occurring illnesses, including viral pneumonia. Not traumatic injury, let alone inflicted injury. The source of the problem is oxygen deprivation; today, you must investigate what might have caused a very sick child with a history of breathing apnea and a fever over 104 degrees to stop breathing.”
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed a 2016 execution and sent Roberson's case back to the trial court to consider the merits of four distinct claims, including a "junk science" claim.
An evidentiary hearing initially began in August 2018 but was continued after the District Clerk found a box of 15-year old evidence, including lost CAT scans of Curtis in the Anderson County Courthouse basement.
“The misplaced evidence was not admitted in the original trial record,” Sween said. “I had no clue where it was and it seemed like the state didn’t either. The only reason it came to light was because of Terese Coker. So that was a genuine shock, but what is equally shocking is that that evidence really does confirm what Robert was saying, that she had fallen out of bed. She had one small bump on the back of her head, but she had no head injury.
“What caused the internal bleeding was from the fact that she stopped breathing and she stopped breathing because she was very sick and had pneumonia and stopped breathing and they were giving her all these drugs that suppressed breathing. There is no sign of violence on her. You can’t beat someone and not leave marks. They looked at the interior blood, from two days later, after she had all this stuff pumped into her system and all the blood that couldn’t go into her brain because she was brain dead, sadly, and they see blood, and they think trauma, but (that’s) not the way it works and the brain expert made this very clear in our proceedings.”
That hearing was finally conducted in 2021 during the COVID pandemic using a combination of Zoom and in-person testimony.
District Court Judge Deborah Evans then made a recommendation that was sent back to the Texas Court of Appeals to determine whether Roberson would receive a new trial. In January 2023, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals upheld the death penalty based on the findings from that new hearing.
Sween said Evans' recommendation did not mention the finding of the “long lost CAT scans.”
"The science has not changed, however the medical terms used are different," Mitchell said. "The term ‘shaken baby syndrome’ is now referred to as ‘abusive head trauma,’ however, Baby Niki died from blunt force trauma to the head.""
The entire story can be read at:
INNOCENCE PROJECT: Case update: On April 10, 2024, lawyers for Mr. Roberson filed a motion to block the Anderson County DA from setting an execution date, given strong evidence of his innocence. Learn more.
Robert Roberson’s case is riddled with unscientific evidence, inaccurate and misleading medical testimony, and prejudicial treatment. 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) hypothesis.
The overwhelming medical and scientific evidence now shows that Nikki died of accidental and natural causes. Mr. Roberson’s innocence case is attracting growing and widespread support from eminent scientists, doctors, faith leaders, innocence groups, former federal judges, best-selling novelist John Grisham, and the lead detective who testified for the prosecution, who now believes he contributed to an innocent person being sent to death row.
The Innocence Project joined Mr. Roberson’s legal team because of the risk that an innocent man could be executed for a crime that never happened.
Here’s what you need to know about Mr. Roberson’s case and the scientifically unsound argument that led to his conviction and death sentence.
1. The prosecution based its case against Mr. Roberson on the hypothesis that Nikki’s death was caused by SBS — a condition that was never scientifically validated and the premises of which have been discredited by actual science.
SBS was first hypothesized by radiologist Dr. John Caffey and neurosurgeon Dr. Norman Guthkelch in the 1970s. The pair proposed that shaking a baby could cause fatal brain bleeds. The “syndrome” came to be associated with a triad of symptoms: bleeding under the dura (the membrane that covers the brain), brain swelling, and retinal hemorrhaging (bleeding in the eyes) — symptoms we now know Nikki experienced due to her pneumonia, the medications she received, and her fall.
Although no evidence or testing ever supported the connection between these symptoms and supposed SBS, by 2001, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published a position paper — which is not a scientific, peer-reviewed study — stating that violent shaking and “shaken baby syndrome” should be presumed whenever these three symptoms are observed. Faced with what was then believed to be proof beyond dispute, Mr. Roberson’s own defense lawyer agreed with the State that Nikki must have died from SBS. When Mr. Roberson refused to accept a plea deal, his lawyer argued only that Mr. Roberson had not meant to kill Nikki and that he was mentally impaired.
In 2009, however, six years after Mr. Roberson was sentenced to death, the AAP retreated from the version of SBS used in his trial. Dr. Guthkelch, the neurosurgeon whose paper first posited the SBS hypothesis, later reviewed a number of cases of people asserting innocence and was struck by the number of cases where children had a history of illnesses, indicating their injuries were the result of natural causes, not abuse. In 2015, shortly before his death, Guthkelch told the Washington Post, “I am doing what I can so long as I have a breath to correct a grossly unjust situation.” Today, no credible science would endorse the SBS premises that Mr. Roberson’s jury was told were sound medical science.
To date, at least 32 parents and caregivers in 18 states have been exonerated after being wrongfully convicted under the shaken baby hypothesis.
Add your name before Texas makes a tragic, irreversible mistake.
2. Nikki was suffering from myriad medical issues that contributed to her death.
However, no doctor at the time of her collapse took a holistic look at her medical history to rule out all the many possible cases of her symptoms, because it was believed at the time that SBS — and only SBS — could explain her condition.
A differential diagnosis would have required considering, for instance, the facts that, days after her birth, Nikki had the first of many infections that proved resistant to multiple antibiotics, including chronic ear infections that persisted even after she had had tubes surgically implanted. She also had a history of unexplained “breathing apnea” that caused her to suddenly stop breathing, collapse, and turn blue.
The week before her death, Nikki had been vomiting, coughing, and having diarrhea. When her symptoms didn’t stop after five days, Mr. Roberson and his mother took Nikki to their local emergency room in Palestine, Texas, where a doctor prescribed Phenergan, a potent drug which now carries an FDA black-box warning against being prescribed to children of Nikki’s age and with her condition. Nikki was sent home. Her condition did not improve and, that night, her temperature rose to 103.1 degrees Fahrenheit. The next morning, Mr. Roberson took her to a pediatrician, who sent the toddler home, despite a fever of 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and prescribed more Phenergan, as well as cough syrup with codeine — an opioid now restricted from children under 18 by the FDA due to its risks of causing breathing difficulties and death. Nikki’s toxicology report showed lethal levels of the respiratory-suppressing Phenergan still in her system.
The next night, Nikki was at the home of her maternal grandparents where she was supposed to stay. Despite being in a bitter battle with Mr. Roberson over custody of Nikki, her grandparents called Mr. Roberson and insisted he drive out to the country and pick the child up, which he did.
At home, Mr. Roberson put Nikki into bed — a mattress and box springs propped up on cinder blocks. In the early morning, he awoke when Nikki cried out. He found her on the floor at the foot of the bed, stayed up, and talked to her until they both fell back to sleep.
Later that morning, when the alarm went off, Robert discovered that Nikki was unconscious and her lips were blue. He grabbed her face, not knowing how to revive her, and tried to wake her. When she didn’t respond, he brought Nikki to the emergency room where her heart was resuscitated and she was intubated. But by then, she had likely already experienced brain death, which occurs after 10-12 minutes of oxygen-deprivation.
3. Symptoms of Mr. Roberson’s autism were used against him.
Mr. Roberson left school after completing 8th grade with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder — which impacts how people communicate and interact with others. Symptoms of autism can include avoiding eye contact, “unusual” mood or emotional reactions, the appearance of indifference, fixation on details that strike others as “abnormal,” and difficulty expressingfeelings.
Hospital staff, who did not know that Mr. Roberson has autism, were suspicious of his flat affect and interpreted his response to his daughter’s condition as lacking emotion. They viewed his inability to explain Nikki’s condition as a sign that he must be lying.
- “I am doing what I can so long as I have a breath to correct a grossly unjust situation.”
Dr. Guthkelch
4. Misguided SBS diagnoses prevailed.
The same doctor in Palestine who had treated Nikki for vomiting, coughing, and diarrhea by prescribing Phenergan treated her again, when Mr. Roberson rushed her to the emergency room. After a CT scan on Nikki’s head showed bleeding under the dura and brain swelling (two of the alleged triad of SBS symptoms), the doctor concluded that it would be “basically impossible” for Nikki’s condition to be caused by a fall out of bed or anything other than abuse.
Because the local hospital in Palestine was not equipped to treat Nikki, she was transported on life support to Dallas Children’s Hospital, where her case was referred to a child abuse pediatrician. This doctor did not review Nikki’s medical history; she spoke only to law enforcement and the maternal grandparents who insisted Nikki had been “totally well.” Upon reviewing Nikki’s CT scans, she saw no fractures of any kind and no neck injuries, but she saw the triad of conditions she considered to be a certain indicator of SBS. The doctor “diagnosed” violent shaking as the one and only possible cause. She then gave an affidavit about her SBS diagnosis to law enforcement, who arrested Mr. Roberson before Nikki’s autopsy was even performed.
The medical examiner who conducted the autopsy did not have any information about Nikki’s extensive medical history. She was also not aware of the CT scans, which showed a single, minor impact on the back right of Nikki’s head (consistent with Mr. Roberson’s report of a fall), nor did she have Nikki’s toxicology results, which would have shown toxic levels of Phenergan.
5. The jury was presented with unfounded claims of child abuse.
At trial, one nurse claimed she saw signs of sexual abuse in Nikki’s case, though no doctors or other medical professionals involved in Nikki’s care observed any such signs and testing from a sexual assault kit produced no substantiating evidence. The nurse, who presented herself as a “Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner” (SANE), was, in fact, not SANE-certified and offered her personal views on pedophiles in her testimony, further stoking the unfounded claims of child abuse against Mr. Roberson.
6. Top neuropathologists and forensic pathologists support that Nikki died of natural and accidental causes.
In 2016, a week before Mr. Roberson’s scheduled execution date, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed his execution based, in part, on a then new law permitting legal challenges based on changes in science used to obtain convictions. His case was sent back to the trial court, which conducted a nine-day evidentiary hearing in 2021. There, experts explained that SBS had been discredited and provided compelling evidence that Nikki died of natural and accidental causes. A pathologist testified that Nikki suffered from a severe form of undiagnosed viral pneumonia that has since been more widely studied due to COVID-19. Signs of Nikki’s advanced pneumonia were noted in her autopsy but, at the time, were unexplained. Tragically, unaware of Nikki’s pneumonia, her treating doctors prescribed her with high levels of prescription medication (found in autopsy toxicology results) that are now understood to be deadly in children of Nikki’s age and in her condition. And biomechanical evidence now shows that short falls like Nikki’s can cause severe injury and even death, an explanation for Nikki’s condition that was vehemently rejected by every medical witness who had testified at her trial.
7. Mr. Roberson deserves a fair shot at justice before it’s too late.
The trial court ignored new evidence from six expert witnesses and rubber-stamped the prosecution’s 17-page proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, which relied almost exclusively on the outdated scientific evidence introduced at the 2003 trial and conducted when the medical establishment accepted unquestioningly that the triad of intracranial conditions observed in Nikki could be used to “diagnose” shaking and abuse.
While the State has not yet sought a new execution date, his life is still in jeopardy. Mr. Roberson has never had a true chance at justice in this case — his federal right to due process and a fair trial were violated by the State’s introduction of false and misleading forensic science. Actual science — supported by studies and empirical testing — has exposed that no crime occurred here.
Mr. Roberson must have his actual innocence claim fairly considered by a state actor before Texas makes a tragic, irreversible mistake. Add your name to stop this injustice.
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
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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.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-12348801
