HOUSTON — A new execution date has been requested for Robert Roberson, a Texas man who had been set last year to become the first person in the U.S. to be put to death for a murder conviction tied to a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.
Monday’s request from the Texas Attorney General’s Office was the first time authorities had asked for a new execution date since Roberson received a stay in October. The execution’s delay followed a flurry of last-ditch legal challenges on the night of his scheduled lethal injection that were prompted by an unprecedented maneuver from a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers who say he is innocent and was sent to death row based on flawed science.
In its five-page motion, the Texas Attorney General’s Office said because the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s top criminal court, has previously denied appeals in Roberson’s case, “the criteria for setting an execution have been met.”
The attorney general’s office requested a new execution date of Oct. 16.
The attorney general’s office did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment Tuesday.
Court documents show the Anderson County District Attorney’s Office, which had prosecuted Roberson, has agreed to let the Texas Attorney General’s Office take over the case.
Roberson, 58, was convicted of the 2002 killing of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, in the East Texas city of Palestine. Prosecutors argued he violently shook his daughter back and forth, causing severe head trauma in what’s called shaken baby syndrome. His lawyers and some medical experts say his daughter died not from abuse but from complications related to pneumonia.
Gretchen Sween, one of Roberson’s attorneys, criticized the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton for asking for a new execution date when Roberson still has an appeal pending before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that his legal team says contains “powerful new evidence of his innocence.”
“There is no justification for the Attorney General’s relentless effort to kill an innocent human being — and no state law or moral law that authorizes seeking an execution date under these circumstances,” Sween said in a statement.
In its latest appeal filed in February, Roberson’s legal team said new evidence, including statements from pathologists that state the girl’s death was not a homicide and question the reliability of conclusions by the medical examiner on the cause of death, show “no rational juror would find Roberson guilty of capital murder; and unreliable and outdated scientific and medical evidence was material to his conviction.”
Roberson’s attorneys have asked that a hearing be held over whether a new execution date should be set. It was not immediately known when a court hearing could be held as the case currently does not have a presiding judge as the previous judge recused herself from the case in November.
Roberson had been in a holding cell in October, a few feet away from America’s busiest death chamber in Huntsville, waiting to receive a lethal injection when he was granted an execution stay after a group of Texas lawmakers issued a subpoena for him to testify before a House committee several days after he was scheduled to die.
The Texas Supreme Court ruled in November that although the subpoena was valid, it could not be used to circumvent a scheduled execution.
Roberson never testified before the House committee as Paxton’s office blocked efforts to have him speak to lawmakers.
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