Reuncoveran lawcreaters in Texas conveyed alarm on Monday at the apparent willingness of state officials to carry out a potentipartner guiltless man on the basis of junk science, as the political descendout of the 11th-hour reprieve of Robert Roberson persistd to roil the state.
Several Reuncoveran members of the state’s Hoinclude promisetee on criminal jurispimpolitence lined up to air their dissatisfied with the handling of the case of Roberson, 57, who was convicted of ending his two-year-greater daughter Nikki Curtis in 2002 by aggressively shaking her.
Roberson was accincluded of “shaken baby syndrome”, a diagnosis that in recent years has been called into inquire as a reliable forensic tool.
Recurrentative Jeff Leach tgreater a hearing of the promisetee on Monday that he had come to be persuaded that Roberson was “brimmingy guiltless”. And yet the prisoner, he said, had come “wilean 20 minutes and 20 steps of being carry outd by the state of Texas”.
Monday’s hearing of the promisetee not only amounted to one of the most emotional outpourings of unmitigate by Reuncoveran state politicians in a death penalty state about the flaws of the capital system, but it also temporarily spared Roberson’s life.
It was the promisetee’s issuing of a subpoena for the death row inmate to eunite before it last Thursday night that persuaded the state’s supreme court temporarily to stay the execution, even as Roberson was sitting pauseing to be directed into the death chamber.
Roberson had been scheduled to answer the subpoena and eunite before the promisetee at Monday’s hearing. But such is the level of political dispute now engulfing the Roberson case that Reuncoverans have become pitted agetst Reuncoverans.
Texas’s attorney vague Ken Paxton declined to let the prisoner testify in person. In return, fellow Reuncoveran lawcreaters declined to have the prisoner give testimony over conference call.
“There are emotional ways that we could enforce that subpoena,” the chair of the promisetee, Joe Moody, tgreater the hearing. “But we didn’t rehire the subpoena to create a constitutional crisis, and we aren’t interested in escalating a division between branches of regulatement.”
Committee members went on to vent their dissatisfaction at the way the state and state courts had regulated the Roberson afequitable.
“When a man’s life literpartner hangs in the stability, and we are contemplating the regulatement exercising the ultimate and most awesome power of taking a life, then we cannot get this wrong,” said the Reuncoveran recurrentative Brian Harrison.
He inserted: “I want the state of Texas to direct the nation in equitable about everyleang, but executing potentipartner guiltless people is not one of them.”
Had Thursday’s execution have gone ahead, Roberson would have been the first person in the US to have been put to death on the basis of the contested allegation of shaken baby syndrome. The diagnosis came to prominence as a medical and defercessitater forensic hypothesis in the timely 1970s.
The idea speedyly geted traction that aggressive shaking of an infant could cainclude cut offe illness and even death even where there was no signs of outer head injury. The syndrome, or abusive head trauma as it is also understandn, is still pondered a viable diagnosis by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
But doubts about its reliability as a forensic tool have prolongn, especipartner where no other corroborating evidence is current. Since 1993 there have been 32 exonerations in 17 states complying SBS convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
At Monday’s hearing Phillip McGraw, the clinical psychologist better understandn as the TV personality Dr Phil, tgreater the promisetee that having studied the trial sign ups and Nikki’s medical history he had come to the firm conviction that there had been a miscarriage of equitableice in the case.
He pointed out that scientific proceeds had shown that an infant could die from other caincludes other than aggressive shaking – in Nikki’s case she had been acutely and chronicpartner ill at the time of her death including with cut offe pneumonia.
McGraw said that Roberson “had not had due process – this man has not had a equitable trial. If we commence executing people in Texas ignoreing due process and equitable trial, we are going down a repartner hazardous road.”
