Robert Roberson and the Shaken Baby Syndrome Controversy

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On Thursday, Robert Roberson will become the first person in the United States to be executed for a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

This controversial medical diagnosis and controversial legal theory has divided courts, doctors, lawyers and law enforcement. Some call it “junk science,” while others continue to view it as the key to identifying and stopping child abuse.

The Texas Court of Appeals and the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole have rejected Roberson’s clemency requests. A bipartisan group of lawmakers, legal experts, and even the detective who originally investigated Roberson’s case makes a series of last-minute Hail Mary attempts to try to save his life by arranging his conviction under the Texas Junk Science Act -Challenge the law.

The 2013 law allows courts to overturn a conviction if the scientific evidence at the heart of a case has changed or been discredited. Roberson has repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to use this law to prove his innocence.

While it rejected Roberson’s claims last week, the Texas appeals court dismissed another case just days earlier, saying it would not do so if “newly developed scientific evidence was presented in the original trial.”

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, at least 34 people convicted based on a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome have been exonerated.

What is Shaken Baby Syndrome?

Shaken baby syndrome was commonly diagnosed starting in the 1980s, when doctors discovered the so-called “triad” of symptoms – unexplained bleeding in the brain, bleeding behind the retina and swelling of the brain.

Dr. Norman Guthkelch, a British pediatric neurosurgeon, is widely credited with first linking these symptoms to shaking a baby in a 1971 paper. Researchers built on his theory as awareness of child abuse increased, and in 1993 the American Academy of Pediatrics declared it a “clearly definable medical condition.”

Doctors, fearful of missing cases of extreme child abuse, resorted to diagnosis to explain otherwise inexplicable symptoms. Over time, a consensus emerged that tremors might be the only way this triad of symptoms could occur. In 2001, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a position paper stating that these three symptoms raise the “presumption of child abuse.”

The next year, Roberson took his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, to the East Texas emergency room and said she had fallen out of bed. Nikki had been ill in the days leading up to the incident, had a fever of 104.5 and was prescribed medication that is no longer given to children. She couldn’t be revived.

Doctors and nurses suspected child abuse and did not believe such a deep fall could have caused her injuries. At trial, doctors testified that Nikki exhibited the triad of symptoms associated with shaken baby syndrome, and Roberson was convicted.

What does science say?

Since Roberson’s conviction in 2002, much more science has emerged about diagnosing shaken baby syndrome.

Around this time, research began to show that many of the same symptoms associated with shaken baby syndrome could also occur in short falls, as well as in a variety of naturally occurring conditions and accidental trauma. Studies have found that shaking a baby violently, which causes these symptoms, would also likely result in a broken neck.

Guthkelch himself rejected the way his hypothesis was used and, before his death, became a strong advocate for the primacy of diagnosing a concussed baby. He told NPR in 2011 that there was no way to say that these three symptoms were always caused by tremors and nothing else.

“If you make a wrong diagnosis in the case of measles, it doesn’t really matter in seven days because the disease is cleared up anyway,” he told NPR. “If you get the diagnosis of fatal shaken baby syndrome wrong, you might.” A person’s life will be ended.

In 2009, the American Academy of Pediatrics expanded the term “shaking baby syndrome” to include “abusive head trauma” and acknowledged that symptoms can also be caused by events other than shaking, including brief falls. In the policy memo, the group noted that “caution is warranted” when diagnosing abusive head trauma and that physicians should consider other possible causes for the symptoms.

In 2020, as more shaken baby syndrome convictions were challenged, the group said these changes had been “misinterpreted by some in the legal and medical community as indicating doubt or invalidity of the diagnosis and mechanism of shaking.” “Injury.” The academy “continues to advocate” shaken baby syndrome as a diagnosis, the position paper states.

What did the courts say?

Recently, there have been a number of shaken baby lawsuits across the country that have been rejected by courts.

In July of this year, the Michigan Supreme Court overturned a rocked 2006 conviction for murdering a baby. Two cases in Ohio have been dismissed by higher courts, one after the medical examiner changed his assessment that a 3-year-old died of shaken baby syndrome to believing the child died from a brief fall.

Last year, a New Jersey judge likened shaken baby syndrome to “junk science” and noted that “no study has ever supported the hypothesis that shaking a child can cause the triad of symptoms associated with shaken baby syndrome.” . An appeals court upheld this ruling.

In 2016, the Texas Court of Appeals halted Roberson’s execution based on the junk science law, but ruled in 2023 that doubts about the cause of Nikki’s death were not enough to overturn his death sentence.

But last week, the same court dismissed a Dallas County case in which Andrew Wayne Roark was found guilty of shaking a 1-year-old, causing irreversible brain damage. If the state’s experts were called to testify today, they would be “confronted with twenty years of serious scientific studies and publications that, when presented graphically, repeatedly deviate from their stated positions,” the court ruled. As a result, “it would be more likely not to have been convicted.”

According to Roberson’s attorney, Gretchen Sween, the same child abuse specialist testified at the original trials against Roark and Roberson. Because of this ruling, “Roberson should logically also be granted a new trial,” she said in a statement.

And yet the appeals court denied Roberson’s latest motion without issuing a written opinion. Roberson still faces execution, and people across the country are still being convicted of abusive head injuries based on the same science, said Randy Papetti, a lawyer, expert and author of “The Forensic Unreliability of The Shaken Baby Syndrome.”

“At least some courts have recognized that the science has changed so much that they are actually overturning convictions,” he said. “At the same time, science is considered good enough to imprison people in other matters and play an enormous role in a man’s execution.”

The current status of the legal situation surrounding this diagnosis is “completely contradictory”.