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Robert Roberson will not be executed next week. Roberson was scheduled to die on October 16, but a Thursday ruling from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed that death sentence for now. The 6-3 ruling of the judges on the state’s high court for criminal matters agreed to reopen Roberson’s challenge to his conviction.
Roberson’s supporters and attorneys celebrated when the ruling came down on Thursday, but they also have some reservations.
“We have won a battle, but we have certainly not won the war, but quite literally our Robert lives to fight another day and that really is a triumph," said Gretchen Sween, Roberson’s lead attorney who has worked for years trying to save her client’s life.
Roberson was convicted in 2003 of the shaken baby syndrome death of his two-year old daughter Nikki who at the time was suffering from chronic pneumonia and was prescribed the wrong medication. He has insisted on his innocence and refused to take a plea deal.
Roberson explained his position in a 2024 Death Row interview with Texas Public Radio.
“I thought they was going to figure it out and do what's right. I thought we had a fair and criminal justice system, but I learned a lot different now since what happened all these years. My mom kept telling me, if you didn't do nothing, it'd get worked out. And they tried to get me plead for life sentence three times. I'm not going to take no life sentence and I'm not going to plead out to nothing I didn't do,” he said.
Sween said she is relieved that Roberson will not receive the lethal injection, but there is a long way to go to before he can get a new trial —which she believes will ultimately set the East Texas man free.
Sween said the appeals court ruling is complicated.
“What he's been awarded is the right to go back to the trial court level and try to demonstrate before that court that he too should be granted a new trial under the ex parte Rourke decision,” Sween said.
The Rourke decision refers to the 2024 CCA decision overturning a shaken-baby–syndrome conviction under Texas’ “junk science” statute. That case was very similar to Roberson’s case.
Andrew Roark had been convicted in 2000 of child injury under a theory that the injuries were caused by “shaken baby syndrome.” Roark appealed, saying that this was junk science based on new scientific evidence.
The court concluded that if that new scientific evidence had been presented at the original trial, it was more likely than not that a jury today would not convict Roark— and accordingly, the CCA vacated Roark’s conviction and remanded for a new trial.
Roark became a precedent in Texas for Shaken Baby Syndrome prosecutions.
Roberson’s attorneys have argued that Roark’s decision should apply to his case because of the same shaken-baby theories, and even the same expert testimonies were used in his 2003 trial.
But the CCA did not throw out Roberson’s conviction and call for a new trial. Instead, it sent Roberson’s case back to his original district court to re-examine the evidence under current scientific understanding.
That court will later make a recommendation to the CCA on how to proceed with Roberson and then the CCA will make another ruling.
So, it’s possible he could be given a new trial or he could be given a new date for execution, depending on how the judges rule.
“So now there is a majority that agreed that this needs to be examined—but they didn’t resolve the question of whether or not Roark means relief for Robert – they are sending that question back to the trial court,” she said.
But for now, Roberson’s supporters, like Republican state representative Brian Harrison, are praising the CCA’s ruling.
“I just want to tell you just how pleased and how strongly I welcome today's ruling by the Court of Criminal Appeals and especially the brave conservative justices who were able to do the thing that they swore an oath to uphold—and that is to seek justice,” he said.
Harrison was instrumental in the legal maneuver that spared Roberson last year, just 90 minutes before he was to be executed.
After the Thursday CCA ruling, Roberson was taken off of “death watch” which is a special extra high security area at the Polunsky Prison and was allowed to return to his original cell.
He’s still on death row, but for now he’s able to go back to his Christian ministry with fellow condemned inmates while the legal fight goes on to possibly prove his actual innocence.
