About 20 years ago, at the beginning of my prison stint, I was double-bunked with a fella who was in for shaking a baby to death. When you’re locked in a cell with a guy, there’s an initial bonding phase. You do pushups together. You talk about your past lives. My story ended with what led me to prison. I was a drug dealer. Shot and killed a man in Brooklyn. My bunkie wasn’t criminal—he was a square. He never mentioned his crime. So, I asked.
In July 2018, Tom, a 31-year-old landscaper, and his 29-year-old girlfriend, Laura Michael, who worked in finance, took their 5-month-old son Franklin on a trip from their home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. A week earlier, Franklin had been sick, running a 104-degree fever, but his doctor signed off on the trip. Laura’s mother, sister, and brother-in law drove down too. They all rented a beach house.In the middle of the night, Franklin started whimpering.
This is the case for 56-year-old Robert Roberson. He is on death row in Texas for an SBS conviction. In 2002 he carried his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, limp and blue, into an East Texas hospital. She died the next day. After doctors diagnosed shaken baby syndrome, Roberson was arrested. The detective who questioned him, Brian Wharton, noted his lack of emotion—Roberson didn’t seem defensive, angry, or sad. In 2003 a jury convicted Roberson and sentenced him to death.
Tom now says he wrote the letter in a state of “absolute despair, believing that I somehow was responsible because that is all I was told from the moment I went into custody.” His defense attorney sent Franklin’s medical file to Mary Gilliland, a forensic pathologist and expert in abusive head trauma who has worked with North Carolina prosecutors for decades. Reviewing the case without payment, Gilliland concluded that Franklin’s death had been an accidental suffocation.
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