Death Row man Robert Roberson is to learn his fate this evening (Monday) after his execution was blocked mere hours before he was scheduled to die.
Roberson, 57, was set to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday last week (October 17) but narrowly avoided death because of an 11th hour intervention from Texas lawmakers. He’s now set to appear before a panel at noon local time today (October 21) in Austin. The inmate was convicted for killing his two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis in a now discredited case of shaken baby syndrome.
In 2002, Roberson found his daughter unresponsive and took her to hospital. He claimed she had fallen off a bed in the family’s house in the East Texas city of Palestine.
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(Image: Texas Department of Criminal Jus)
During the trial, doctors testified that Nikki’s death was consistent with shaken baby syndrome, a condition where a child suffers severe injuries from being violently thrown back and forth. Despite the jury’s guilty verdict, Roberson has always insisted he is innocent.
“It wasn’t a crime committed,” Roberson told CNN about a week before he was due to executed. “I was falsely, wrongly convicted of a crime – they said it was a crime, but it wasn’t no crime and stuff because I had a sick little girl, you know?”
Roberson – who is autistic – has his lawyers arguing that his behaviour was unjustly held against him in court, while his medics didn’t properly consider other potential causes for Curtis’ symptoms like pneumonia, reports Mirror US.
On Wednesday, October 16, Texas’ parole board rejected a last ditch clemency bid on Roberson’s behalf, recommending against commuting his life sentence and against delaying the execution.
However, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Texas House of Representatives issued a subpoena for him to testify before their panel this week. Just 90 minutes before Roberson was set to be executed the House criminal jurisprudence committee managed to get a temporary restraining order against the state – meaning the execution was delayed.
Roberson’s hearing later today will go somewhere to to deciding whether the prisoner will get a re-scheduled execution, or receive ultra-rare act of clemency.
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