Dean among coalition of lawmakers seeking clemency for East Texas man on death row

Published 5:45 am Thursday, October 3, 2024

State Rep. Jay Dean of Longview is one of 86 Republican and Democratic Texas House members urging clemency for an East Texas man on death row.

Robert Roberson III is set for execution Oct. 17 in the 2002 murder of his 2-year-old daughter in Palestine. Roberson has maintained his innocence, arguing that his conviction was based on “junk science” relating to the child’s shaken baby syndrome diagnosis.

The lawmakers signed a letter asking the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend clemency, which only Gov. Greg Abbott can grant. The board can take up until two days before the execution date to make a recommendation to the governor.

“The reality is there’s new scientific evidence that shows the child was not shaken to death, and so we are just asking the court to review the scientific evidence in the case,” said Dean, a Republican.

He said he previously was aware of the case but has no personal connection to it. Dean said state Rep. Lacey Hull, whom he described as his good friend and colleague, told him about Roberson’s situation.

“I trusted her legal background,” Dean said. “I trust she’s don’t a lot of research on this.”

In the letter, the lawmakers cited “voluminous new scientific evidence” that they and Roberson’s attorneys argued demonstrates his innocence and explains that the cause of his daughter’s death was natural and accidental.

“It should shock all Texans that we are barreling towards an execution in the face of this new evidence,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter. “Other states look to Texas as a leader for both enforcing the rule of law and addressing wrongful convictions. We now look to you to prevent our state from tarnishing that reputation by allowing this execution to proceed.”

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals previously stopped Roberson’s execution in 2016, but in 2023, the state’s highest criminal court decided that doubt over the cause of Roberson’s daughter’s death was not enough to overturn his death sentence, and his new execution date was set in July. Then, without reviewing the merits of Roberson’s claims, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals recently dismissed a motion to halt the execution and a final application for relief filed by Roberson’s attorneys.

Roberson’s daughter was severely ill before she died, and he had taken her, unconscious, to a hospital after finding she had fallen out of her bed. Doctors and nurses were unable to revive the child. Medical officials did not believe such a low fall could have caused the fatal injuries and suspected child abuse.

During Roberson’s trial, doctors testified that the child’s death was consistent with shaken baby syndrome — in which an infant is severely injured from being shaken back and forth.

While medical professionals were trained at the time of the child’s death to presume abuse when infants presented certain internal head injuries, Roberson’s attorneys argued those symptoms have now been linked to various naturally occurring illnesses and accidents,

The stay of execution in 2016 came largely as a product of a 2013 state law, dubbed the “junk science law,” which allows Texas courts to overturn a conviction when the scientific evidence used to reach a verdict has since changed or been discredited.

Lawmakers, in passing the bill, highlighted cases of infant trauma that used faulty science to convict defendants as examples of the cases the legislation was meant to target. But critics have argued that in the decade since the law was codified, it has rarely provided justice as intended for wrongfully convicted individuals.

“We changed the law to give that path. As far as we can tell, though, the courts simply aren’t engaging in that process,” Texas Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso and co-chair of the Criminal Justice Reform Caucus, said on Tuesday. “We shouldn’t be executing someone when there’s this much doubt about whether a crime was even committed.”

Roberson’s attorneys recently submitted his petition for clemency, along with letters of support signed by dozens of scientists and medical professionals, parental rights groups, organizations that advocate for people with autism, faith leaders, and attorneys who have represented people wrongfully convicted of child abuse.

Over the course of his appeals, Roberson’s attorneys sought to debunk the shaken baby diagnosis that led to his conviction. They argued that a range of expert opinions and new evidence — including medical records that illustrated his daughter’s illness and medications in the days leading up to her death and a long-lost CAT scan — prove that she died of natural and accidental causes, not of head trauma.

“No informed doctor today would presume abuse based on a triad of internal head conditions, as occurred in Robert’s case,” his attorneys wrote in his petition for clemency. “But in the era when Robert was accused and convicted, conventional medical thinking gave doctors permission to skip consideration of any other factors and presume shaking and inflicted head trauma — an approach that has since been completely rejected as unsound.”

Prosecutors, meanwhile, have maintained that the evidence supporting Roberson’s conviction is still “clear and convincing” and that the science around shaken baby syndrome has not changed as much as his defense attorneys claimed.

Roberson’s attorneys also argued that his autism — which was not diagnosed until 2018 — “directly contributed” to his conviction, with doctors and law enforcement viewing his “flat demeanor” as a “sign of culpability.”

Brian Wharton, the lead detective who investigated Roberson’s daughter’s death and sided against him at trial, has said he now believes in his innocence, especially after learning of Roberson’s disability, and has advocated for his exoneration.

“I will be forever haunted by my participation in his arrest and prosecution,” Wharton, who submitted a letter in support of clemency, said on Tuesday. “He is an innocent man.”