Texas Lawmakers Did Something Unprecedented to Save an Innocent Man’s Life

Robert Roberson, who was wrongfully convicted of a capital crime, was due to die on Thursday at 6 p.m. He is alive today because a committee of the Texas Legislature did something genuinely unprecedented in this country’s history: It made ingenious use of an ordinary legislative power to create a legislative reprieve and stop his execution.

Their bold action shows the lengths to which people of goodwill, on all sides of the death penalty debate, will go to stop an injustice from happening. And it opens new possibilities for people who want to stop an execution—not only in Texas, but across the nation.

Roberson was convicted and sentenced to death for killing his infant daughter Nikki, back in 2002. His conviction was based on testimony that she died from “shaken baby syndrome,” a now largely discredited scientific theory.

Shaken baby syndrome has been implicated in numerous miscarriages of justice throughout the United States. Data compiled by the National Registry of Exonerations shows that at least 30 people with convictions involving that theory have subsequently been exonerated.

Earlier this week, it seemed that Roberson would be the first person ever executed in a case involving shaken baby syndrome. And he might still be, unless he is exonerated—that fate has been delayed, but remains on the table. The injustice of such an execution cannot be overstated.

At the time of her death, the Innocence Project reports, Nikki “was sick with a high fever and suffered a short fall from bed. Hospital staff did not know Mr. Roberson had autism and judged his response to his daughter’s grave condition as lacking emotion.” They called the police.

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In 2003, when Roberson went on trial, shaken baby syndrome was, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a statement accompanying the Supreme Court’s refusal on Thursday to hear his case, “so unquestioned that Roberson’s own defense counsel told the jury in his opening statement that this was ‘unfortunately a shaken baby case,’ that the evidence would ‘show that Nikki did suffer injuries that are totally consistent with those applied by rotational forces more commonly known as shaken baby syndrome,’ and that he........

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