Texas is because of execute a person for murdering his two-year-old daughter, regardless of doubts about his guilt.
Robert Roberson is scheduled to obtain a deadly injection on Thursday after Texas’s Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected his plea for clemency.
If the execution proceeds, he would be the first particular person in america to face capital punishment for a homicide conviction linked to the controversial shaken baby syndrome diagnosis.
Roberson has maintained his innocence within the demise of his daughter, Nikki Curtis, and the lead detective investigating the case has additionally come to his defence, urging the state to name off the execution.
Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, may grant a one-time 30-day reprieve for Roberson’s set execution, however he can’t give full clemency with out the board of parole’s suggestion.
Gretchen Sween, one among Roberson’s attorneys, urged the governor to grant the reprieve “so we are able to proceed to pursue Mr Roberson’s innocence declare”.
“We pray that Governor Abbott does all the pieces in his energy to forestall the tragic, irreversible mistake of executing an harmless man,” Sween stated.
In his practically 10 years as governor, Abbott has halted just one imminent execution.
‘System failed’
Calls have grown to cease Roberson’s execution on account of questions concerning the proof of his daughter struggling shaken child syndrome, a mind damage brought on by shaking or violent affect.
Roberson’s supporters say medical doctors misdiagnosed Curtis’s accidents as being associated to shaken child syndrome and that new proof exhibits the lady died not from abuse however from issues associated to extreme pneumonia.
Roberson’s attorneys additionally recommend that his autism, which was undiagnosed on the time of his daughter’s demise, was used in opposition to him as authorities grew suspicious due to his lack of emotion over what had occurred to his daughter.
One distinguished voice that has come to Roberson’s defence is conservative activist Doug Deason, who wrote on Tuesday in a publish on X: “I imagine he’s harmless”.
One other advocate is the lead detective in Roberson’s case, Brian Wharton, who has expressed remorse for enjoying a task in his conviction.
“Realizing all the pieces that I do know now, I’m firmly satisfied that Robert is an harmless man,” Wharton stated at a current information convention organised by Roberson’s supporters. “The system failed Robert.”
The Anderson County District Legal professional’s Workplace, which prosecuted Roberson, has stated in courtroom paperwork that, after a 2022 listening to to contemplate the brand new proof within the case, a choose rejected the theories that pneumonia and different ailments brought on Curtis’s demise.
‘Rise within the fee of executions’
Roberson is one among a number of males scheduled to be executed within the subsequent month within the US, the place laws on capital punishment are determined by particular person states.
Derrick Ryan Dearman, convicted of murdering 5 individuals in a 2016 house assault in Alabama, will face deadly injection the identical day as Roberson.
Thomas Eugene Creech, convicted of six murders, together with the beating of a fellow inmate to demise in 1981, is about to obtain a deadly injection on November 13, some 9 months after the state botched its first attempt to place him to demise, failing to discover a viable vein to ship the deadly drug into.
UN human rights spokesperson Seif Magango issued a press release expressing concern concerning the “rise within the fee of executions” within the US, which put to demise six individuals in a 12-day window final month.
A kind of executed was Emmanuel Littlejohn, who was killed by deadly injection final month regardless of a parole board in Oklahoma recommending his life be spared.
One other man, Marcellus Williams, whose homicide conviction was known as into query by a prosecutor, was also executed by deadly injection in September.
“We urge america to hitch the rising world consensus in the direction of common abolition of the demise penalty – starting by promptly imposing a moratorium on executions,” stated Magango.
