Texas Supreme Court Halts Execution in Shaken Baby Case

Robert Roberson had been set to be executed on Thursday night for the death of his 2-year-old child. But after a bipartisan intervention by Texas lawmakers, the Supreme Court issued a stay.

The Texas Supreme Court on Thursday halted the execution of Robert Roberson, a Texas man convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter, after a roller-coaster series of legal maneuvers initiated by an unusual intervention from a bipartisan group of Texas House members.

The decision by the state’s highest civil court related to a procedural question raised by the legislators’ issuing a subpoena for Mr. Roberson to testify before the Legislature on Monday and not the details of his case. But the effect was to run out the clock for the time being.

Because the execution could not be carried out before midnight, a new date would now have to be set.

“We’re deeply grateful to the Texas Supreme Court,” two of the legislators, Jeff Leach, a Dallas-area Republican, and Joe Moody, an El Paso Democrat, said in a joint statement. “We look forward to welcoming Robert to the Texas Capitol, and along with 31 million Texans, finally giving him — and the truth — a chance to be heard.”

The execution by lethal injection, which had been set to take place at a prison in Huntsville, would have been the first in a case attributed to shaken baby syndrome, a diagnosis that has raised questions in the scientific community, death penalty experts said.

Lawyers for Mr. Roberson had sought to prevent the execution by appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court and requesting a reprieve from Gov. Greg Abbott. But neither stepped in.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued a separate order declining to stay the execution. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a statement along with the court’s order, said that while the court could not stop the execution, Mr. Abbott of Texas could and should grant a temporary reprieve.

“An executive reprieve of 30 days would provide the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles with an opportunity to reconsider the evidence of Roberson’s actual innocence,” the justice wrote. “That could prevent a miscarriage of justice from occurring.”

Instead, it was members of the Texas House, outraged by what they saw as injustice in Mr. Roberson’s case, and seeking to make time for a new hearing on the evidence, who forced the execution’s postponement.

Mr. Roberson’s execution was one of two scheduled in the country on Thursday. In Alabama, officials carried out the execution of Derrick Dearman, who had admitted to killing five of his girlfriend’s relatives in 2016. Mr. Dearman, 36, died by lethal injection. He had stopped fighting his death sentence this year and said he wanted to be executed so that his victims’ family members could have justice.

Mr. Roberson’s case has drawn intense national scrutiny because of the role that the shaken baby diagnosis played in his conviction. His lawyers maintain that no crime was committed at all and have presented evidence and expert testimony that his daughter, Nikki, most likely died in 2002 from pneumonia exacerbated by medication that she had been prescribed.

Gretchen Sween, a lawyer for Mr. Roberson, said that his supporters were “elated tonight” by the actions of the “brave, bipartisan Texas lawmakers” who dug into the facts of Mr. Roberson’s case. “He lives to fight another day and hopes that his experience can help improve the integrity of our criminal legal system,” she said.

Shaken baby syndrome is a medical determination that abuse has caused serious or fatal head trauma, and it has played a role in criminal convictions for decades.

The American Academy of Pediatrics still recognizes the diagnosis, but it has come under scrutiny in recent years as some doctors and defense lawyers have challenged its reliability, particularly in cases where little other evidence of abuse exists.

Mr. Roberson’s lawyers have also said that his autism, diagnosed after his trial, played a role in the conviction because investigators saw his apparent lack of emotion or grief as evidence of guilt.

More than half of the Republican-dominated Texas House has lobbied for the case to be reviewed. The detective who helped convict him now says he believes Mr. Roberson is innocent. John Grisham, a novelist who has been supporting Mr. Roberson, pleaded this week for the execution to be halted.

Mr. Roberson, 56, has granted several television interviews from death row, including one this week with Phil McGraw on “Dr. Phil Primetime.”

With few options left, Mr. Roberson’s lawyers had appealed to Mr. Abbott to step in and order a one-time, 30-day reprieve to allow for further legal challenges. Under Texas law, the governor cannot grant clemency after the state board has recommended against it.

Members of the Texas House, urging the courts to reconsider the case, began their attempt to intervene on Wednesday, when they issued a subpoena seeking to delay the execution by compelling Mr. Roberson to testify before a legislative committee on Monday.

Hours before the execution, Mr. Leach and Mr. Moody sought a court order to temporarily halt the execution so that Mr. Roberson could respond to the subpoena. Mr. Leach appeared in the video hearing sitting in his car, an indication of how quickly the proceeding had been arranged.

“This is an extraordinary remedy that the Legislature is seeking,” Mr. Leach said. But he argued that it fell within the powers granted to the Texas House under the State Constitution.

The district court ruled on the validity of the legislators’ subpoena but did not address the merits of the arguments in defense of Mr. Roberson. Soon after, the state’s highest criminal court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, overruled the lower-court decision on the subpoena.

At roughly the same time — and with the execution primed to go ahead once again — the House members then filed an emergency motion with the Texas Supreme Court, which stepped in and ruled that the question of the subpoena was a civil one and should have properly been handled by the State Supreme Court and not the high criminal court.

But the court said in its order that it would not consider the details of Mr. Roberson’s case.

“Anything other than laser-like focus on the specific civil-law questions presented — and especially the competing authority of the legislative and executive branches in this situation — is therefore off limits,” Justice Evan A. Young wrote in a concurrence to the court’s order that was joined by the chief justice, Nathan L. Hecht, and Justice Rebeca Aizpuru Huddle. There was no dissent.

The matter now returns to the district court in Travis County where the Texas attorney general would represent the executive branch against the House members.

Earlier, the attorney general’s office had cited evidence from the trial in opposing the defense’s requests for a stay of execution.

“Roberson has repeatedly challenged the validity of his conviction and death sentence, and he has been properly rejected in each instance,” the state wrote in its brief to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It said there was testimony from Mr. Roberson’s girlfriend that before his daughter’s death, Mr. Roberson was “violent towards Nikki; he had paddled the toddler, shaken and thrown her, threatened her and screamed at her.”

In response, Ms. Sween, Mr. Roberson’s lawyer, said that the attorney general’s description was an “inaccurate summary of testimony from wholly incredible witnesses manufactured for trial” and that the accusations were “unsupported by any contemporaneous records.” She said Mr. Roberson had no history of violence.

Mr. Roberson’s lawyers have argued that the understanding of shaken baby syndrome has changed in the two decades since his trial, and that he was convicted under a narrow understanding of the medical condition when Nikki stopped breathing and Mr. Roberson took her to the emergency room on Jan. 31, 2002.

Mr. Roberson said at the time that a bruise on Nikki’s head could be explained by her having fallen from the bed where they were both sleeping.

Scans taken at the hospital showed subdural bleeding, brain swelling and retinal hemorrhages. The three conditions, taken together, have been used in the past to infer abuse in shaken baby cases.

But those conditions can also appear as a result of disease. Mr. Roberson’s lawyers have argued that Nikki’s condition was more likely explained by the respiratory infection that she had been fighting in the days before her death, and the medication prescribed to her that could have suppressed her breathing.

Mr. Roberson has had his execution delayed once before, in 2016. At that time, the Court of Criminal Appeals intervened so that new medical and expert evidence could be presented by his lawyers.

But the court ultimately ruled against him. It also denied appeals to reconsider his conviction under the state’s “junk science” law, which allows for convictions to be challenged based on changes to the science that was relied upon in their cases.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting.