ANDERSON COUNTY, Texas — An Anderson County man sitting on death row is attempting to get his sentenced overturned by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Robert Roberson III, 57, has been on death row since February 2003 after he was found guilty of murdering his 2-year-old daughter in 2002.
According to records from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Roberson took his daughter to Palestine Regional Hospital on Jan. 31, 2002, claiming she had fallen out of bed. She had severe trauma to her head and died from her injuries at a Dallas medical center the next day. Roberson was then charged in connection with the child's death.
The clemency petition filed by Roberson and his legal team states he is innocent. The petition comes alongside over 200 letters from Texas Legislators, parents rights advocates, Autism advocate organizations, attorneys and former lead detective on the case, Brian Wharton, showing support for Roberson.
"This is not a case where the State got the wrong person," the petition reads. "Instead, a crime was alleged — but none actually occurred. Robert was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death after his chronically ill two-year-old daughter, Nikki, died. He was arrested before Nikki was even taken off life support. He was barred from visiting her in the hospital. His parental rights were summarily terminated without a hearing. He was thrown in a jail suicide cell, without access to a lawyer. When a lawyer was finally appointed for him because he was indigent, that lawyer, without doing any investigation, insisted that the State was right: Robert must have shaken his daughter and caused her condition, regardless of his insistence that he loved his little girl and would not have done anything to harm her."
The petition goes on to state Roberson has undiagnosed developmental autism and fought to get custody of his daughter, who was chronically ill. His daughter died two months after he was awarded custody.
Roberson's legal team says his daughter's lungs were infected and a recent reexamination of lung tissue collected during her autopsy revealed "a chronic interstitial viral pneumonia and a secondary acute bacterial pneumonia were ravishing her lungs, causing sepsis and then septic shock."
According to the petition, Roberson took his daughter to the emergency room multiple times in the days before she collapsed.
"But unaware of her severe pneumonia, doctors sent her home with medications that would only have made her condition worse," the petition states. "As an expert in medical toxicology has now explained, the medications prescribed to her —Phenergan (the brand name for promethazine) and codeine — would only have further suppressed [his daughter's] ability to take in oxygen. Codeine is a narcotic, not recommended for anyone under age eighteen; Phenergan now has FDA “black box warnings” against prescribing it to children [his daughter's] age and in her condition precisely because it can suppress breathing and result in death."
The petition states Roberson woke up Jan. 31, 2002, and found his daughter comatose and blue in color.
"He frantically tried to wake her, to no avail," the petition reads. "He then took her back to the ER. The medical personnel revived her heart, but her eyes were already “fixed and dilated,” a grave sign of brain death. [His daughter's] oxygen-deprived brain had swollen and shifted, putting pressure on her eyes. Thereafter, the blood being pumped by the resuscitated heart could only pool inside the skull, outside of the brain. When a CAT scan was taken, revealing a triad of internal head conditions— a subdural bleed, brain swelling, and retinal hemorrhages — doctors presumed (1) that [his daughter] had sustained a traumatic head injury and (2) that her father, as the only person with her at the time of her collapse, must be responsible. No one at the time investigated the condition of [his daughter's] lungs or considered what may have caused her to cease breathing. No one considered [his daughter's] medical history, which included chronic infections that multiple strains of antibiotics had failed to resolve and alarming 'breathing apnea' spells when she would inexplicably cease breathing, collapse, and turn blue from oxygen-deprivation. No one considered that, just two days before, her fever had been measured at 104.5 degrees F in the pediatrician’s office. Certainly, no one conducted a painstaking examination of the lung tissue of this child on Medicaid. That new examination, by a lung pathologist with nearly 50 years of experience studying lung disease, has finally revealed the truth about [his daughter's] tragic death. The consequences of [his daughter's] undiagnosed double pneumonia, as it progressed to sepsis and then cardiac- and pulmonary-arrest, were viewed in isolation and interpreted as signs of a head injury, presumed to have been 'inflicted.'"
On Feb. 1, 2002, Roberson was arrested based on a diagnosis of "Shaken Baby Syndrome."
To read the full petition, click here.
As of Sept. 17, 2024, Roberson is set to be executed Oct. 17, 2024.