An East Texas man could soon become the nation's first person killed by the state based on the controversial hypothesis.
The hearing on the innocence claims of a condemned man began on August 14, 2018, with what seemed like a major setback. Defense attorney Gretchen Sween—who represented Robert Roberson, III, a father convicted of killing his 27-month-old daughter in 2002—told Anderson County Judge Deborah Oakes Evans that crucial pieces of evidence were missing. Scans of the young girl’s head, made in the weeks before her death and shortly before she died, were nowhere to be found.
The jury in Roberson’s original 2003 trial had never seen these scans. Neither had one of the prosecutor’s key witnesses: Dr. Jill Urban, a forensic pathologist with the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office, who performed Nikkis’ autopsy. The scans were referenced in medical records, so attorneys knew they existed—they had been asking for them for years.
Experts are uniquely troubled by this trend, since a faulty determination of SBS can allow people to be convicted of crimes that never actually occurred.in the nation to pass a “junk science law”, which allows people to appeal convictions based on outdated or debunked forensic science. But since the law passed in 2013, no Texans on death row have successfully used it to get a new trial. Roberson’s lawyers continue to argue he deserves one.
The young girl had been sick for days. Roberson had taken her to the doctor for symptoms that included coughing, vomiting, diarrhea, and a fever of up to 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit. According to Roberson’s defense team, around 5 a.m. on January 31, 2002, Roberson woke up to find Nikki had fallen out of bed and was lying on the floor. He said he consoled Nikki, and they both went back to sleep. When he woke up again around 9 a.m., he found she’d turned blue.
Despite expert testimony and information gleaned from the lost scans, Judge Evans affirmed Roberson’s conviction and death sentence in February 2022. The following year, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Evans’ decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. But Roberson’s lawyers continue to plead with the CCA to take another look, saying the evidence suggests Nikki’s death was tragic but natural.
SBS was widely accepted in the medical and legal communities at the time of Roberson’s trial in 2003. More than 3,000 convictions in the United States had been secured based on SBS as of 2018, according to Debate intensified as parents and others convicted of abuse solely on the basis of doctors’ diagnoses of SBS continued to fight their cases. Andre Asnes, executive committee member of the AAP Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, told thethat—despite the term’s appearance in medical literature—practicing clinicians never widely adopted the “triad” standard for diagnosing surefire abuse. “Rather, it is an invention whose use is confined to the courtroom.
Roberson’s case is not being considered in a vacuum: Other cases—past and present, in Texas and elsewhere in the United States—may influence how things play out. his girlfriend’s daughter had fallen out of bed and she wasn’t waking up. The 13-month-old girl was taken to Children’s Medical Center Dallas, where doctors doubted Roark’s story. The baby survived, but Roarke was arrested that night.
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