John Grisham Asks if Texas Will Execute An Innocent Man

Dear Friends,

Please read this powerful piece by author John Grisham about Robert Roberson, an innocent father with autism who has spent over 20 years on death row in Texas for a crime that never occurred. Mr. Roberson was committed to being a present father to his chronically ill two-year-old daughter Nikki. Tragically, Nikki passed away, and her father was wrongfully convicted of her death under the now-debunked “shaken baby syndrome” hypothesis. Texas has scheduled to execute him on October 17th.

As Grisham describes, Nikki was gravely ill with severe, undiagnosed viral pneumonia at the time of her death. Mr. Roberson took Nikki to the doctor twice that week because of her high fever; doctors gave her drugs that are no longer prescribed to children because they can cause them to stop breathing. Experts now say that Nikki died of undiagnosed pneumonia, not child abuse.

“Shaken baby syndrome,” or SBS, has been widely debunked as false forensic evidence with no basis in legitimate science. The British neurosurgeon who first used the term has since disavowed it, decrying prosecutors’ use of SBS to target innocent caregivers; he said, “I am frankly quite disturbed that what I intended as a friendly suggestion for avoiding injury to children has become an excuse for imprisoning innocent people.”

So far, at least 32 caregivers, wrongfully convicted under bogus SBS hypotheses, have been exonerated.

If our legal system were just, Mr. Roberson—convicted based on false forensic evidence for a crime that never occurred—would have a straightforward legal pathway to exoneration. But as described in a recent Intercept article on Mr. Roberson, that is not the case. A Texas law known as the “junk science writ” is supposed to exonerate innocent people, like Mr. Roberson, who were convicted based on false forensic evidence. But the law isn’t living up to its promise of freeing the innocent—a problem we documented in our recent report, An Unfulfilled Promise: Assessing the Efficacy of Article 11.073—and so far Texas courts have rejected Mr. Roberson’s claim.

If Mr. Roberson is executed, he will be the first person in the United States executed under the SBS myth. But it doesn’t have to end that way. There is still time for Texas lawmakers and courts to acknowledge widespread scientific consensus and step in to save Mr. Roberson’s life. If you haven’t yet, please lend your voice to the chorus calling for Mr. Roberson to be saved, and sign the petition.

With gratitude,