by Bestselling author John Grisham has joined scores of bipartisan politicians, lawyers, scientists and doctors to sound the alarm that Texas is about to execute an innocent man convicted of a crime that never happened.
Grisham, whose legal thrillers have been turned into such Hollywood blockbusters as The Firm and The Pelican Brief, spoke out on Tuesday about the case of Robert Roberson, 57. Roberson is on death row in Texas for more than 20 years due to violent shaking. the death of his two-year-old daughter, Nikki.
Roberson is scheduled to be executed on October 17. Had his death been by lethal injection he would have been the first person in the United States to be executed on the basis of the “Shaken baby syndrome” – a medical hypothesis from the 1970s that was widely dismissed as a form of junk science.
“The great thing about Robert’s case is that there was no crime,” Grisham told reporters. “In most capital cases, you have a murder and someone did it, but in Robert’s case there was no crime and yet we’re about to kill someone for it in Texas. It’s so scary.”
Grisham’s comments came as Roberson’s lawyers filed a 62-page clemency petition with the Texas board of pardons and paroles asking for his death sentence to be commuted. The petition is a last chance for the prisoner, who is now at the mercy of the courts or the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, to whom the board reports.
As his Oct. 17 execution date approaches, Roberson’s options are running out. Last week the Texas court of criminal appeals denied his appeal.
The petition boldly sets forth Roberson’s innocence, saying that this is not a case where the wrong man was convicted, but a case where the crime he was accused of did not even occur. He says: “No offense occurred… Mr. Roberson is actually innocent of the offense for which he was convicted and sentenced to death based on pseudoscience that has since been discredited.”
Grisham said he wanted to join the campaign to save Roberson’s life because “I’m just angry about these cases. I can’t let them go, I think about them all the time. Especially a case like Roberts where we’re a month away, the clock is ticking, and we still have clear scientific proof that he didn’t kill Nikki.”
The author began his life working as a criminal lawyer in a small town in Mississippi. He wrote his first novel, A Time to Kill, in 1989 and followed it with a stream of bestsellers.
In 2006 he wrote his first non-fiction book, The Innocent Man , about Ron Williamson who was wrongly convicted of rape and murder and executed in Oklahoma until his dismissal in 1999. From there, Grisham joined the board of Innocent Projects and First Aid Ministries that have helped free at least 200 people from poverty in the US over the past half century.
His next book, Framed, which comes out two days before Roberson’s scheduled execution, is a non-fiction work that tells 10 true stories about people who were wrongfully convicted by a system warped by racism, corruption and faulty evidence. “I’m up to my ears in wrongful convictions,” he said.
Grisham isn’t the only public figure supporting Roberson in his final countdown to death. More than 30 leading scientists and doctors, a cross-party group of 84 Texas legislators, 70 lawyers representing clients wrongly accused of child abuse, and a range of autism advocacy groups lent their support Tuesday to the ditch effort this last recovered. the prisoner.
The clemency petition contends that Roberson’s conviction was based on three serious errors. When Nikki was brought to the hospital in February 2002 in a comatose state, medical personnel determined that she had been violently shaken without looking at her actual medical record.
Because of that initial error, law enforcement officers and doctors were unable to investigate further. As a result, they missed critical signs, including that the girl was sick with a fever of 104.5F (40.3C) shortly before she fell unconscious, that she had undiagnosed pneumonia, and that she was given medical drugs believed to be shin to be life-threatening. children – each could explain their plight.
The third mistake, the petition contends, is that the detectives and medical staff who approached Roberson, unaware that he was autistic, portrayed his nondescript behavior as the posture of a callous killer and not a product of his condition.
Brian Wharton, the lead detective on the case who testified against Roberson at his trial, now believes that the entire prosecution he led was based on negligence. Last year he told the Guardian: “There was no crime scene, no forensic evidence. It was just three words: shaken baby syndrome. Without them, he would be a free man today.”
Shaken Baby Syndrome, or SBS for short, is a theory of child abuse that emerged in the early 1970s. It was proposed as an explanation for why some children presented with severe, and sometimes fatal, illness with symptoms of internal head trauma but little or no sign of external injury.
It was British pediatric neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch who early proposed the theory that violent shaking of the baby could be the cause. The concept spread rapidly until it had acquired the status of knowledge.
Since then, however, prominent scientists have questioned the reliability of SBS, both as a medical diagnosis and as a forensic methodology used in criminal cases. More than 80 other non-violent causes of the symptoms have been identified, including short falls and illness – both of which were seen in Nikki’s case.
Doubts about the syndrome have grown to the extent that many authorities now consider it unreliable, including Guthkelch himself who has expressed dismay at how the theory has been used to prosecute thousands of parents for child abuse. Concern has spread throughout the criminal justice system and 32 people convicted on the basis of SBS have been exonerated since 1993, according to the National Freedom Registry.
Grisham compared Roberson’s case to that of Cameron Todd Willingham who Texas executed in 2004 for murdering his three young children. Willingham was accused of setting the family home on fire based on forensic arson theories that were found to be junk science.
“Twenty years ago Texas executed a man for a crime that never happened,” Grisham said. “Now here we are 20 years later and we are the victim of another execution where there was no crime and where the science has been destroyed. Texas is about to execute another innocent man.”
