The Dallas Morning News read roughly 3,000 pages of court documents from Roberson’s guilt-innocence trial, punishment phase, and post-conviction proceedings...
A review of roughly 3,000 pages of court documents sheds light on how the evidence presented at the original trial has evolved.Rep. Jeff Leach shows an image of a rug with blood stain of death row inmate Robert Roberson’s daughter during a committee hearing about the case of Roberson at the Texas State Capitol, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024, in Austin.wheeled his girlfriend into the emergency room sometime before 10 a.m. She held in her lap a bundle wrapped in either a blanket or a coat.
Dr. Jill Urban, the Dallas County medical examiner who ruled Nikki’s death a homicide and the cause of death “blunt force injuries,” testified Nikki’s injuries were, in part, a result of “multiple blows to the head,” which she said could include shaking. If Urban had ruled Nikki’s manner of death an accident or undetermined, it would have drastically altered how — or if — Roberson was prosecuted.. The allegation was first made by Sims, one of the nurses who examined Nikki at the hospital.
Roberson sought relief under the state’s “junk science” law, which allows people to challenge convictions if they can show changes in science undercut the integrity of their conviction. The 2013 law accounts for the ever-evolving nature of science in the judicial system. For example, law enforcement once hypnotized witnesses to elicit memories, and blood spatter analysis was used to reconstruct crimes..
More than 30 people who served time in prison after convictions involving shaken baby syndrome have been declared innocent, according toEngineer Kenneth Monson calculated the force Nikki could have endured if she’d stood up and fallen off Roberson’s bed or if she’d rolled off the mattress. A fall from standing on the bed could have been lethal, according to Monson, but Auer said the “goose egg,” or mushy spot on Nikki’s head, was not a fatal head injury.
After weighing the testimony, the judge ruled against Roberson in February 2022, stating his attorneys failed to show shaken baby syndrome was “discredited and no longer an accepted medical diagnosis.”
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