Kayla Guo in Undark:
When Texas’ highest criminal court stopped Robert Roberson’s execution in 2016, it agreed with his lawyers that there was enough doubt over the cause of his daughter’s death to warrant a second look. Roberson, who was convicted in 2003 of killing his 2-year-old daughter Nikki, has maintained his innocence during more than 20 years on death row. To Roberson and his lawyers, the decision was exactly what a groundbreaking Texas statute, dubbed the “junk science law,” was meant to do: provide justice when the scientific evidence that led to a conviction has been discredited.
Now with a chance to exonerate Roberson, his lawyers got to work. They compiled a 302-page filing of new evidence that they said invalidated the finding that his daughter died from shaken baby syndrome. The filing summarized medical articles on how the consensus around shaken baby diagnoses had cracked, medical records that illustrated Nikki’s illness and medications in the days leading up to her death, and long-lost CAT scans that they said proved she did not die from being violently shaken. The state, meanwhile, submitted a 17-page filing that argued that the science around shaken baby diagnoses had not changed that much, and that the evidence that pointed to Roberson as his daughter’s killer remained “clear and convincing.”
More here.
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