New execution date set for Texas death row inmate in shaken baby syndrome case

HOUSTON (AP) — A judge on Wednesday set a new execution date for Robert Roberson, a Texas man who won a last-minute reprieve last year and could become the first person in the U.S. to be put to death for a murder conviction tied to a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

State district Judge Austin Reeve Jackson set an Oct. 16 execution date for Roberson during a court hearing.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office had requested that the execution date be scheduled. Roberson’s lawyers had objected, arguing Roberson still has an appeal pending before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that his legal team says contains “powerful new evidence of his innocence.”

Roberson received a last-minute stay last October after a flurry of legal challenges that were prompted by an unprecedented maneuver from a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers who say he is innocent and was sent to death row based on flawed science.

Roberson, 58, was convicted of the 2002 killing of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, in the East Texas city of Palestine. Prosecutors argued he violently shook his daughter back and forth, causing severe head trauma in what’s called shaken baby syndrome. His lawyers and some medical experts say his daughter died not from abuse but from complications related to pneumonia.

In its latest appeal filed in February, Roberson’s legal team said that based on new evidence “no rational juror would find Roberson guilty of capital murder; and unreliable and outdated scientific and medical evidence was material to his conviction.” The new evidence includes statements from pathologists that state the girl’s death was not a homicide and who question the reliability of conclusions by the medical examiner on the cause of death.

Roberson was in a holding cell on Oct. 17, 2024, a few feet away from America’s busiest death chamber in Huntsville, waiting to receive a lethal injection when he was granted an execution stay after a group of Texas lawmakers issued a subpoena for him to testify before a House committee several days after he was scheduled to die.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled in November that although the subpoena was valid, it could not be used to circumvent a scheduled execution.

Roberson never testified before the House committee as Paxton’s office blocked efforts to have him speak to lawmakers.

Court documents show the Anderson County District Attorney’s Office, which had prosecuted Roberson, has agreed to let Paxton’s office take over the case.

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