Robert Roberson Loses Appeal Against Texas Execution Due to ‘Shaked Baby Syndrome’ Exposed

Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson lost one of his final appeals on Friday. The Texas appeals court refused to stop his execution on October 17.

This narrows Roberson’s path to avoiding the death penalty.

Republican Rep. Jeff Leach responded on social media by calling it “a terribly unfair and incomprehensible decision” that I believe requires immediate action by lawmakers.

Democratic Rep. Joe Moody, chairman of the Texas House Criminal Justice Committee, called a committee hearing for Oct. 16, a day before Roberson’s scheduled execution.

“We are hurtling toward an execution while a strong bipartisan majority of #tx MPs aren’t even sure a crime took place — and are quite certain that due process didn’t,” Moody said on X. “We have to do everything we can. “I can put the brakes on before this tarnishes the Texas justice system for generations.”

Roberson’s lawyers have argued that his conviction was based on “shake baby syndrome,” a now-discredited theory that says violently shaking a baby can cause fatal brain damage – but without leaving other signs of physical trauma.

In 2002, Roberson’s two-year-old daughter Nikki came down with a fever of 104.5. The little girl was born with chronic health problems that were never fully diagnosed. She frequently stopped breathing and turned blue.

Over the course of a week, Roberson took the toddler to both the emergency room and her pediatrician, who prescribed codeine and another powerful medication. Both are respiratory suppressants that medical experts say are no longer prescribed to children.

And in the early morning of January 31, Nikki stopped breathing again. When Roberson rushed his daughter to the hospital in Palestine, Texas, Nikki could not be revived. Her heart was revived, but not her brain. She was taken off life support the next day.

“I lost my little girl and then they blamed me for it because I couldn’t explain what happened to her,” Roberson told TPR in an interview from Texas’ death row in Huntsville. “So they just said I was guilty because the hospital told investigators this was a specific type of case involving baby shaking, and that’s what they did. They never investigated.”

The lead investigator on the case says that’s correct. No theory beyond shaken baby syndrome has ever been seriously investigated.

Roberson is on the autism spectrum and also has a low IQ.

“People who know him have described him as a kind of Forrest Gump,” said Gretchen Sween, Roberson’s lead attorney. “He has this developmental disability, this lifelong one, but he also has this kind of childlike innocence and authenticity and is very intuitive and kind to people.”

Sween said the hospital performed a CAT scan on Nikki and found a swollen, bleeding brain – thought at the time to be a classic sign of shaken baby syndrome.

But now medical experts suggest that pneumonia and lack of oxygen to the brain can cause these symptoms – and Nikki had both.

But in 2002, East Texas hospital staff thought a father had murdered his daughter. They called the police. They immediately suspected Roberson because of his strange behavior.

Roberson was convicted primarily because of his emotionless behavior and sentenced to death that night and in the courtroom in front of the jury.

But the jury was never told about Nikki’s chronic illness problems.

In recent years, medical experts re-examined Nikki’s lung tissue and discovered that she was suffering from two types of pneumonia that caused sepsis and then septic shock.

To date, courts have exonerated and released at least 33 people convicted based on a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome. The medical consensus today is that diagnosis is based on junk science.

A few days ago, the Texas Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of a Dallas man in a similarly rocked baby case. Roberson’s lawyers argued that their client should be granted a new trial.

More than 13,000 people have signed a petition calling for Roberson’s threatened execution to be stopped.