Roberson’s legal team is fighting for a new trial before his execution date on Oct. 16, citing outdated evidence and his autism diagnosis.
AUSTIN, Texas — The two-decade fight to save Robert Roberson from the execution chamber in Huntsville could be in its final 20 days if his legal team doesn’t get an answer on his latest appeal.
“It’s an overwhelmingly momentous situation to be in where the State of Texas is pressing to kill someone for a crime that didn’t occur,” his attorney Gretchen Sween told WFAA.
Convicted in 2003 for the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Roberson was sentenced to death. But his legal team, in a multi-year fight from East Texas to Austin, has sought to prove his conviction was partly due to inadequate legal representation at the time, the use of “shaken baby syndrome” as evidence that is now widely criticized as “junk science”, and the inability to consider that the young girl had a multitude of other medical issues that could have led to her death.
In his initial trial, Roberson was also criticized for allegedly showing little emotion when he brought his daughter to a Palestine emergency room for help. His legal team says he was diagnosed later as being on the autism spectrum.
“This is an autistic man. It’s a man with a disability. He’s been formally diagnosed now. We really want to have that taken into consideration,” said Jacquie Benestante, executive director of the Autism Society of Texas. Along with the Autism Society of America, Benestante sent a letter to lawmakers this week asking that Roberson receive a new trial.
“And we really feel like the courts should re-examine all the evidence with a full awareness of his autism and the current medical science,” Benestante told WFAA.
Roberson was originally scheduled for execution in October 2024. But a bipartisan group of lawmakers intervened and got the Texas Supreme Court to grant them a delay.
Attorney General Ken Paxton said at the time that those lawmakers “created a Constitutional crisis on behalf of a man who beat his two-year-old daughter to death.”
The summary on Roberson’s TDCJ information page states his daughter was taken “to Palestine Regional Medical Center with severe trauma to her head. The victim died from her injuries the next day and Roberson was subsequently charged in her death.”
“It’s just an outrageous betrayal of the truth,” Sween said of Roberson’s murder conviction.
Although Roberson’s legal team is waiting for word on their latest pending appeal, a new execution date is set for Oct. 16. A clemency request needs to be filed no later than 21 days in advance of an execution. That date has passed. But Sween says they do not want clemency. A first clemency request in 2024 was denied and clemency, if granted, would only commute Roberson’s sentence to life without parole. They want a new trial.
“We are fighting for a new trial to vindicate Robert’s innocence. And he is so vulnerable now to being executed without the truth getting out about his innocence,” Sween said.
Appeals court decisions are usually published on Wednesdays. There are three Wednesday’s left before Oct. 16.