An autistic man is on death row for a crime he didn't commit.
Kim Bellware and Tobi Raji at WP:
The path to stopping the country’s first execution based on the widely refuted theory known as “shaken baby syndrome” narrowed Tuesday after a district judge in Texas declined to vacate the death warrant for Robert Roberson, a 57-year-old man with autism who is scheduled to die by lethal injection this week.
Roberson’s case has galvanized a bipartisan coalition of 86 Texas lawmakers, scientists and even the former lead detective from his 2002 case to fight for a reprieve. Supporters cite Roberson’s case as a prime example of a conviction wrongfully secured by a decades-old theory many scientists and legal experts say is unreliable “junk science” in the vein of discredited forensics such as bite-mark and bloodstain-pattern analysis.
Lawyers for Roberson argue he faces execution over a nonexistent crime: His 2-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis died in 2002 from an undiagnosed case of double pneumonia, lawyers said; doctors incorrectly presumed symptoms such as brain swelling and bleeding were from abuse and did not investigate other possibilities. Suspicion of Roberson’s guilt was fueled by his seemingly unemotional response to Nikki’s dire condition — the result, lawyers say, of autism spectrum disorder, which he was not formally diagnosed with until 2018.
The Autism Society of America and @AutismTx are urgently appealing to Texas Governor Abbott to grant clemency to Robert Roberson, an Autistic individual facing execution in less than a week. See how you can take Action in our Press Release. https://t.co/7cQRGsSz8F
— autismsociety (@AutismSociety) October 15, 2024
