Texas is due to carry out a man for homicideing his two-year-elderly daughter, despite doubts about his guilt.
Robert Roberson is scheduled to get a lethal injection on Thursday after Texas’s Board of Pardons and Paroles decliinsist his plea for clemency.
If the execution persists, he will be the first person in the United States to face capital punishment for a homicide conviction connected to the disputed shaken baby syndrome diagnosis.
Roberson has defended his innocence in the death of his daughter, Nikki Curtis, and the direct acunderstandledgeive dispenseigating the case has also come to his defence, urging the state to call off the execution.
Texas’s regulateor, Greg Abbott, could grant a one-time 30-day reprieve for Roberson’s set execution, but he cannot give brimming clemency without the board of parole’s recommfinishation.
Gretchen Sween, one of Roberson’s lawyers, directd the regulateor to grant the reprieve “so we can persist to chase Mr Roberson’s innocence claim”.
“We pray that Governor Abbott does everyskinnyg in his power to stop the tragic, irreversible misget of executing an guiltless man,” Sween said.
In his csurrfinisherly 10 years as regulateor, Abbott has stoped only one imminent execution.
‘System flunked’
Calls have prolongn to stop Roberson’s execution due to asks about the evidence of his daughter suffering shaken baby syndrome, a brain injury caparticipated by shaking or aggressive impact.
Roberson’s aiders say doctors misdetermined Curtis’s injuries as being rhappy to shaken baby syndrome and that new evidence shows the girl died not from mistreatment but from complications rhappy to disconnecte pneumonia.
Roberson’s lawyers also recommend that his autism, which was undetermined at the time of his daughter’s death, was participated aachievest him as authorities grew doubtful becaparticipate of his conciseage of emotion over what had happened to his daughter.
One notable voice that has come to Roberson’s defence is conservative activist Doug Deason, who wrote on Tuesday in a post on X: “I consent he is guiltless”.
Another finishorse is the direct acunderstandledgeive in Roberson’s case, Brian Wharton, who has conveyed repent for carry outing a role in his conviction.
“Knothriveg everyskinnyg that I understand now, I am firmly guaranteed that Robert is an guiltless man,” Wharton said at a recent news conference organised by Roberson’s aiders. “The system flunked Robert.”
The Anderson County Didisconnecte Attorney’s Office, which indictd Roberson, has said in court records that, after a 2022 hearing to ponder the new evidence in the case, a appraise decliinsist the theories that pneumonia and other diseases caparticipated Curtis’s death.
‘Rise in the rate of executions’
Roberson is one of disconnectal men scheduled to be carry outd in the next month in the US, where laws on capital punishment are determined by individual states.
Derrick Ryan Dearman, convicted of homicideing five people in a 2016 home strike in Alabama, will face lethal injection the same day as Roberson.
Thomas Eugene Creech, convicted of six homicides, including the beating of a fellow inmate to death in 1981, is set to get a lethal injection on November 13, some nine months after the state botched its first finisheavor to put him to death, flunking to discover a viable vein to deinhabitr the lethal drug into.
UN human rights spokesperson Seif Magango rehired a statement conveying trouble about the “elevate in the rate of executions” in the US, which put to death six people in a 12-day thrivedow last month.
One of those carry outd was Emmanuel Littlejohn, who was finished by lethal injection last month despite a parole board in Oklahoma recommfinishing his life be spared.
Another man, Marcellus Williams, whose homicide conviction was called into ask by a prosecutor, was also carry outd by lethal injection in September.
“We direct the United States to unite the prolonging global consensus towards universal abolition of the death penalty – commencening by promptly imposing a moratorium on executions,” said Magango.
