Robert Roberson asks Texas appeals court to delay October execution

(CN) — Death row inmate Robert Roberson asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Thursday to stop his scheduled execution, which a judge set last week for Oct. 16.

In a motion for stay of execution, Roberson asked the court to delay his execution to give the court time to consider his pending habeas corpus application.

“The need for full and fair deliberation should be especially obvious in a case that has been fraught with due process problems and where considerable evidence of innocence has been amassed but not yet considered,” Roberson argued in his motion for a stay.

Roberson’s case has garnered widespread attention, with advocates and state lawmakers arguing he was wrongfully convicted in 2003 of the capital murder of his two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis.

Roberson disputes that his daughter died from shaken baby syndrome, a controversial diagnosis where a caregiver is believed to have violently shaken an infant or toddler, causing the child’s brain to move back and forth within the skull, resulting in significant brain damage.

He and his advocates say new evidence proves Roberson did not cause his daughter’s death, pointing to medical experts who say Nikki actually died from undiagnosed pneumonia.

Roberson would be the first person in the nation to be executed in a shaken baby syndrome case.

The Texas attorney general’s office, which has taken over Roberson’s case from the local district attorney’s office, did not immediately respond to an after hours request for comment. The attorney general’s office has previously insisted that Roberson was not wrongfully convicted.

While doctors once believed that a certain constellation of injuries pointed definitively to a child having been shaken, more recent research indicates that other causes can also result in these same injuries. At least 40 people in the U.S. have been exonerated after being convicted in cases involving shaken baby syndrome, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

The Texas attorney general’s office has argued Roberson was not convicted of shaken baby syndrome but of beating his daughter to death, something Roberson’s attorneys dispute.

Roberson was set to be executed last October, but lawmakers made an unprecedented move to block the execution last-minute by subpoenaing Roberson to testify before the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence. The Texas Supreme Court temporarily halted the execution, but it later ruled that lawmakers could only subpoena Roberson in a manner that doesn’t interfere with a scheduled execution.

Earlier this year, the Texas House of Representatives passed a bill to reform the state’s “junk science” law to make it easier for convicts like Roberson to have their cases reopened if scientific evidence used to convict them has since been discredited, but the bill died in the state senate when the Texas legislative session ended last month.