Supreme Court declines to intervene in Robert Roberson’s execution

CAPITAL CASE

The Supreme Court docket on Thursday refused to cease the execution of Robert Roberson, who was scheduled to be killed by deadly injection in Texas Thursday evening for the 2002 loss of life of his two-year-old daughter, Nikki. Prosecutors had argued that Nikki suffered from shaken child syndrome, a analysis for sure mind accidents that has since been questioned. Roberson and his supporters contended that he was harmless, as a result of new proof exhibits that Nikki really died from double pneumonia and a associated fall from her mattress.

In a press release concerning the courtroom’s resolution to not intervene, Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasised that “[f]ew instances extra urgently name for” a keep of execution “than one the place the accused has made a severe exhibiting of precise innocence, as Roberson as right here.” However there was no declare beneath federal legislation for the Supreme Court docket to behave on, she concluded. As an alternative, she wrote, Roberson’s solely remaining hope is a reprieve from Tex. Governor Greg Abbott.

Shortly earlier than the Supreme Court docket launched its order declining to intervene, a choose in Travis County, Tex., quickly halted Roberson’s execution. State lawmakers from each events on Wednesday issued a subpoena to require Roberson to seem subsequent week earlier than the Texas Home Committee on Judiciary and Jurisprudence. The workplace of the state’s lawyer common has indicated that it intends to enchantment that call.

Within the week earlier than her loss of life, Nikki had been significantly ailing with what docs recognized as a respiratory an infection, together with a fever that typically reached 104.5 levels. On the morning that she died, Nikki fell off the bed. Each Roberson and Nikki went again to sleep; when Roberson awoke once more, she had stopped respiratory and turned blue.

Roberson took Nikki to the hospital, the place CAT scans revealed bleeding and swelling in her mind, in addition to bleeding in her retinas. On the time, Roberson says, these three situations have been presumed to be the results of shaken child syndrome. Mixed with a scarcity of emotional response from Roberson (who was recognized with autism after his trial), they prompted prosecutors to cost him with Nikki’s homicide. He was convicted and sentenced to loss of life by a jury in 2003.

Roberson now contends that the idea of shaken child syndrome on which prosecutors relied to convict him 20 years in the past has been “solely discredited” and that he’s harmless. New proof, he says, exhibits that Nikki’s loss of life was brought on by “a virulent double pneumonia” that had “progressed to the purpose of sepsis” and was made worse by drugs, now not prescribed to youngsters, that suppressed respiratory.

In a quick order, Texas’s highest courtroom for prison instances declined to overview the brand new proof introduced by Roberson, prompting him to come back to the Supreme Court docket. By dismissing his request with none clarification, Roberson contended, the Texas courtroom “successfully slammed the courthouse doorways to” him “with none courtroom ever reviewing the deserves of his claims establishing his precise innocence.”

Brian Wharton, the lead detective who initially investigated Nikki’s loss of life, says he now has “unassailable doubt that Robert didn’t do it.” In a video produced by the New York Instances, Wharton – who’s now a minister – mentioned that police and prosecutors didn’t contemplate some other prospects aside from shaken child syndrome for Nikki’s accidents, however he’s “satisfied we did the fallacious factor.”

A bipartisan group of 86 Texas lawmakers has additionally expressed assist for Roberson. In a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s board of pardons and paroles searching for clemency for Roberson, the group steered that Roberson ought to at a minimal get a brand new trial based mostly on a Texas legislation that enables challenges to convictions that rested on “disproven or incomplete science.”

However the state urged the justices to permit Roberson’s execution to go forward. Roberson doesn’t present that he’s harmless, it contended. As an alternative, Nikkie’s accidents “are inconsistent with a brief fall from a mattress or issues from a virus.” At most, the state steered, “Roberson’s new scientific proof … engages a ‘battle of the consultants’ concerning the analysis” of shaken child syndrome.

The state added that the Supreme Court docket has by no means required state courts contemplating claims for post-conviction reduction to “present an in depth clarification for the applying of a state procedural rule.” However even when it had, the state continued, the Supreme Court docket couldn’t overview the state courtroom’s resolution in Roberson’s case as a result of it rests solely on state legislation.

In a quick order issued shortly earlier than 6 p.m. Jap time on Thursday, the justices turned down Roberson’s plea to place his execution on maintain.

Sotomayor’s 10-page assertion noticed that “[c]urrent postconviction treatments typically fail to appropriate convictions ‘secured by what we now know was defective science.’ This case is emblematic of that downside.”

However the Supreme Court docket, she defined, might solely keep Roberson’s execution if he can present that he’s more likely to succeed on a declare beneath federal legislation – one thing Roberson didn’t elevate earlier than the Texas Court docket of Prison Appeals. As an alternative, she noticed, his solely federal-law declare challenged the state courtroom’s failure to elucidate its dismissal of his petition for reduction. And the Supreme Court docket has made clear that it “has no energy to inform state courts how they have to write their opinions,” Sotomayor wrote.

On the identical time, Sotomayor acknowledged the proof that Roberson had introduced to assist his declare that he’s harmless. In mild of that proof, she wrote, a keep to permit reconsideration of that proof “is crucial; but this Court docket is unable to grant it.” She subsequently urged Abbott to provide Roberson a 30-day reprieve. “That,” Sotomayor concluded, “might stop a miscarriage of justice from occurring: executing a person who has raised credible proof of precise innocence.”

This text was initially printed at Howe on the Court docket.