A district court will not dismiss the execution warrant for Robert Roberson III, an East Texas man on death row accused of shaking his daughter to death in 2002.
Roberson is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Oct. 17. Prosecutors said his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, died from injuries caused by being violently shaken, also known as shaken baby syndrome. Roberson's attorneys said new evidence suggests that's not what killed the little girl and that his life should be spared.
On Tuesday, NBC affiliate KETK-TV in Tyler reported that Judge Alfonso Charles, the Tenth Administrative Judicial Region presiding judge, denied the defense’s motion to vacate Roberson’s execution warrant. Charles also denied the motion to vacate the previous judge, Deborah Oakes Evans, from the case. Evans is now retired.
Roberson attended court via Zoom from the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, where death row inmates are housed.
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Roberson's attorneys said he was wrongfully arrested and later convicted after taking his daughter to a hospital after she fell out of bed in their Palestine, Texas home. The defense team is looking to cast doubt on shaken baby syndrome’s legitimacy, citing other cases where convictions were overturned centered on the syndrome.
Roberson's defense also said new evidence gathered since his 2003 trial shows that “his daughter died from undiagnosed pneumonia that progressed to sepsis and was likely accelerated by medications that should not have been prescribed to her and made it harder for her to breathe.”
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After the Tuesday hearing, lawmakers, activists, and exonerees from previous wrongful convictions joined Roberson’s attorneys on the courthouse steps to talk to the press.
“I’m enraged. I’m heartbroken, and we are not giving up this fight,” one of Roberson’s attorneys, Gretchen Sween, said. “We have filed something this very morning, a subsequent habeas petition under the same junk science law. God, please be with us this time because just last week, Texas’s highest criminal court declared the science used to convict Robert is not reliable, and yet he can’t have the evidence even considered.”
Now Roberson's attorneys are asking for a 30-day stay of execution, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott could grant. In September, a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers petitioned the Republican governor and the state's Board of Pardons and Paroles to stop the scheduled execution.
State Rep. Jeff Leach (R-Collin County) stood alongside activists and attorneys on the Anderson County courthouse steps on Tuesday, saying he planned to go straight back to Austin to continue fighting.
“I join with death penalty supporters, like myself, and death penalty opponents in the legislature who are asking and imploring and doing everything we possibly can to simply push the pause button before Thursday,” Leach said.
Leach is also the chair of the Texas House Jurisprudence Committee, which he said will review the case on Wednesday.
“Tomorrow, the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee will hold a public hearing in the Texas House,” Leach said. “We’ll shine a light on this case for all 31 million Texans to hear, to watch, to see. We’re hopeful that by Thursday evening, we’ll be able to secure a pause button in this case."
