The Texas Supreme Court halted Thursday night’s scheduled execution of a man who would have become the first person in the U.S. put to death for a murder conviction tied to a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.
The late-night ruling to spare for now the life of Robert Roberson, who was convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter in 2002, capped a flurry of last-ditch legal challenges and weeks of public pressure from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers who say he is innocent and was sent to death row based on flawed science.
Every time I look into Shaken baby syndrome I find plenty of people with real medical credentials say either it doesn’t exist, or it could exist but there are other much more likely causes of death that share similar evidence. That leave plenty of doubt in my mind and thus I can never convict anyone of it.