A extremely anticipated legislative listening to started Monday however with out its key witness: a Texas inmate whose execution for his daughter’s “shaken child” demise was narrowly averted final week.
Robert Roberson was anticipated to seem earlier than the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence in Austin after members issued a subpoena on Wednesday for him to testify about his case, which set off a flurry of litigation that finally halted his execution late Thursday with solely hours to spare.
But Committee Chairman Rep. Joe Moody stated that he was not snug with the state’s supply of getting Roberson seem by way of a video hyperlink as an alternative of in individual, given the inmate’s autism and unfamiliarity with the expertise.
“When I assumed concerning the lodging to be made, I thought-about his wants as an individual with a incapacity above all different issues,” Moody stated.
The circumstance of his deliberate testimony stays below negotiations amid the authorized wrangling, and Moody added that he desires the entire stakeholders “to come back collectively in our goal right here, which is ensuring Robert is heard.”
The unprecedented try by Roberson’s protection staff to have him transported from his jail close to Houston to the capital was caught up in a authorized battle after the state Office of the Attorney General challenged the transfer in an emergency submitting over the weekend with the Texas Supreme Court. The excessive courtroom, nevertheless, stated Sunday it could not rule on the way during which Roberson should testify.
The legal professional basic’s workplace stated it could not produce him in individual for Monday’s listening to, citing security issues and the dearth of a state facility close to Austin that would briefly home him. It stated he might seem just about.
Meanwhile, the state Supreme Court set submitting deadlines for the approaching days to resolve a separation-of-powers situation after the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees executions, opposed the excessive courtroom’s determination late Thursday that prevented Roberson’s execution.
Roberson, 57, has maintained his innocence within the 2002 demise of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, based mostly on “shaken child syndrome.” He could be the primary individual within the United States to be executed in such a case, which his protection staff argues hinged on a now-broadly discredited medical prognosis, one which has been successfully challenged in different convictions throughout the nation.
A spokesperson for the state Department of Criminal Justice had stated Friday that the company would adjust to the subpoena, with out commenting on the logistics of Roberson’s potential in-person look earlier than the House committee.
Committee members need him to testify because it pertains to a 2013 “junk science” legislation that enables Texas inmates to probably problem convictions based mostly on advances in forensic science. The subpoena was issued to assist purchase extra time for Roberson, who nonetheless faces execution if the legal professional basic’s workplace seeks one other demise warrant.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also can grant a one-time 30-day reprieve, however in a letter filed Monday with the Texas Supreme Court, his counsel voiced help for the state’s efforts in difficult how House committee members have been in a position to cease the execution and argued that the courts overstepped their authority.
“Unless the Court rejects that tactic, it may be repeated in each capital case, successfully rewriting the Constitution to reassign an influence given solely to the Governor,” Abbott’s counsel wrote.
Roberson’s case has received help from a bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers who imagine he was unfairly convicted with out a jury listening to the total proof of Nikki’s power sickness past what occurred to her proper earlier than she died.
In an interview from jail with NBC News anchor Lester Holt this month, Roberson was adamant that “I would love the general public to know that I’m harmless.”
Roberson stated that early Jan. 31, 2002, he awoke to a “unusual cry” in his east Texas house and located Nikki had fallen off the bed. He comforted her and the household went again to sleep, in response to courtroom paperwork.
But hours later, Roberson stated, he awoke and realized Nikki was not respiratory and her lips seemed blue. He took her to an emergency room, the place docs concluded she was exhibiting indicators of mind demise. The subsequent day, she was pronounced lifeless.
Roberson confirmed little emotion on the hospital, which furthered legislation enforcement’s suspicions. Within a day, the lead police detective, Brian Wharton, arrested him on a capital homicide cost.
Prosecutors argued that Nikki should have been shaken to demise as a result of she had been recognized with “the triad” — a swollen and bleeding mind and retinal hemorrhaging — signs as soon as believed to be indeniable proof of shaken child syndrome.
Wharton testified towards Roberson at his trial. Prosecutors highlighted that they imagine Roberson deliberately shook Nikki, inflicting bruising and blunt drive trauma, and that he appeared virtually impassive when he took her to the hospital.
Roberson has attributed his “flat have an effect on” to autism spectrum dysfunction, which he was recognized with in 2018.
The jury additionally by no means heard the extent of how sick Nikki was from the day she was born, nor that she had been taken to the hospital greater than 40 occasions in her brief life.
Two days earlier than she died, she registered a 104.5-degree fever on the physician’s workplace. She was despatched house with a medicine that has since been deemed too harmful for youngsters — a drug that now carries a “black field warning” from the Food and Drug Administration.
Since Roberson’s conviction in 2003, the science behind the triad being the only prognosis of abuse has come below intense scrutiny, and it’s now medical consensus that different medical circumstances, together with infections, unintentional trauma and pre-existing sicknesses, also can trigger the signs related to shaken child syndrome.
Wharton, the lead detective within the case, has additionally voiced his help for Roberson, telling House committee members at a listening to final week: “This is an harmless man, past query.”
Anderson County prosecutors, nevertheless, proceed to insist in courtroom filings that Nikki was murdered and Roberson is guilty, noting how he has frequently misplaced his appeals and that his protection “has raised the identical drained points that this courtroom and others have already litigated within the final habeas proceedings together with junk science, illness course of and precise innocence.”