Texas Appeals Court Overturns ‘Shaken Baby’ Conviction Ahead of Execution Date in Another Disputed Case
As the state of Texas prepares for the first execution in the country based on evidence of what used to be called “shaken baby syndrome,” a state appeals court has overturned a conviction in a separate, similar case.
The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday that Andrew Roark, a Dallas man who was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2000 in a shaken baby case, deserves a new trial because it’s unlikely that a jury would convict him today if they heard current scientific testimony. Two of the state’s expert witnesses at Roark’s trial later recanted portions of their testimony about the unlikelihood of accidental or natural causes for the symptoms they observed.
“We find that scientific knowledge has evolved regarding SBS and its application in [Roark’s] case,” the court wrote. “Additionally, we find that given further study, the experts would have given a different opinion on several issues at a trial today—some already have. The admissible scientific testimony at trial today would likely yield an acquittal.”
There is likely no one else in the country as interested in the case, besides Roark, than Robert Roberson, a Texas death row inmate scheduled to be executed on October 17. Roberson would be the first person in the U.S. to be executed based on evidence of what used to be called “shaken baby syndrome,” now officially called abusive head trauma (AHT).Â
Roberson’s lawyers filed another appeal this week asking the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals to reconsider its previous decisions denying him relief in light of Roark’s case, especially since both trials featured testimony from the same expert witness, Janet Squires—a licensed expert in child abuse pediatrics who has testified in hundreds of child-abuse trials.
“The same prosecution expert testified in both trials making many identical pronouncements about how shaking had to be the principal explanation for the child’s brain condition, when science has since demonstrated that many things, including natural disease progression and accidental short falls with head impact, can cause the same conditions,” Gretchen Sween, Roberson’s attorney, said in a press release. “The flaws in the expert testimony are nearly identical.”
As Reason detailed in a feature on Roberson’s case in August, he was convicted in 2003 of murdering his two-year-old daughter Nikki and sentenced to death. He claimed that
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