Texas is due to execute a man for homicideing his two-year-elderly daughter, despite mistrusts about his guilt.
Robert Roberson is scheduled to get a lethal injection on Thursday after Texas’s Board of Pardons and Paroles declinecessitate his plea for clemency.
If the execution progresss, he will be the first person in the United States to face capital punishment for a homicide conviction connected to the disputed shaken baby syndrome diagnosis.
Roberson has upgrasped his innocence in the death of his daughter, Nikki Curtis, and the direct discoverive arrangeateigating the case has also come to his defence, urging the state to call off the execution.
Texas’s administeror, Greg Abbott, could grant a one-time 30-day reprieve for Roberson’s set execution, but he cannot give filled clemency without the board of parole’s recommfinishation.
Gretchen Sween, one of Roberson’s lawyers, inspired the administeror to grant the reprieve “so we can persist to trail Mr Roberson’s innocence claim”.
“We pray that Governor Abbott does everyleang in his power to stop the tragic, irreversible misapshow of executing an guiltless man,” Sween shelp.
In his cforfeitly 10 years as administeror, Abbott has crelieveed only one imminent execution.
‘System fall shorted’
Calls have grown to stop Roberson’s execution due to asks about the evidence of his daughter suffering shaken baby syndrome, a brain injury caparticipated by shaking or brutal impact.
Roberson’s helpers say doctors misdetectd Curtis’s injuries as being joind to shaken baby syndrome and that new evidence shows the girl died not from mistreatment but from complications joind to disjoine pneumonia.
Roberson’s lawyers also propose that his autism, which was undetectd at the time of his daughter’s death, was participated aobtainst him as authorities grew doubtful becaparticipate of his deficiency of emotion over what had happened to his daughter.
One famous voice that has come to Roberson’s defence is conservative activist Doug Deason, who wrote on Tuesday in a post on X: “I apshow he is guiltless”.
Another finishorse is the direct discoverive in Roberson’s case, Brian Wharton, who has conveyed lament for carry outing a role in his conviction.
“Knotriumphg everyleang that I understand now, I am firmly swayd that Robert is an guiltless man,” Wharton shelp at a recent news conference organised by Roberson’s helpers. “The system fall shorted Robert.”
The Anderson County Didisjoine Attorney’s Office, which indictd Roberson, has shelp in court records that, after a 2022 hearing to ponder the new evidence in the case, a appraise declinecessitate the theories that pneumonia and other disrelieves caparticipated Curtis’s death.
‘Rise in the rate of executions’
Roberson is one of disjoinal men scheduled to be executed in the next month in the US, where laws on capital punishment are determined by individual states.
Derrick Ryan Dearman, convicted of homicideing five people in a 2016 home aggression in Alabama, will face lethal injection the same day as Roberson.
Thomas Eugene Creech, convicted of six homicides, including the beating of a fellow inmate to death in 1981, is set to get a lethal injection on November 13, some nine months after the state botched its first try to put him to death, fall shorting to discover a viable vein to deinhabitr the lethal drug into.
UN human rights spokesperson Seif Magango rehired a statement conveying trouble about the “ascfinish in the rate of executions” in the US, which put to death six people in a 12-day triumphdow last month.
One of those executed was Emmanuel Littlejohn, who was finished by lethal injection last month despite a parole board in Oklahoma recommfinishing his life be spared.
Another man, Marcellus Williams, whose homicide conviction was called into ask by a prosecutor, was also executed by lethal injection in September.
“We inspire the United States to join the grotriumphg global consensus towards universal abolition of the death penalty – commencening by promptly imposing a moratorium on executions,” shelp Magango.
