With one week left before Robert Roberson is to be executed by the state of Texas, his attorney, Gretchen Sween, informed the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Tuesday that new evidence strongly suggests the judge who presided over Roberson’s 2003 trial was biased against him. Sween argues that the evidence requires the state to retry her client.
“It is now indisputable that Robert’s case was infected by egregious judicial misconduct from the outset,” Sween told reporters. “It’s shocking that we are discovering the truth about this glaring, undisclosed evidence of bias only by chance, from a podcast, days before Robert is scheduled to be executed for a tragedy that has been mislabeled as a crime.”
Roberson was convicted in 2003 of murdering his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, on the basis of the controversial medical theory known as shaken baby syndrome. In 2002, he brought his unconscious daughter to the Palestine emergency room, where doctors restarted her heart and sent her to a hospital in Dallas. Roberson told the Palestine police that he had awoken to find Nikki unconscious. They took him into custody, suspicious that he had beaten her. Nikki was taken off life support in Dallas and died. Roberson was charged with murder…