Bestselling author John Grisham has joined dozens of politicians, lawyers, scientists and doctors from both parties sounding the alarm. Texas is about to execute an innocent man convicted of a crime that never happened.
Grisham, whose legal thrillers have been turned into Hollywood blockbusters like The Firm and The Pelican Brief, spoke out Tuesday in the case of Robert Roberson, 57. Roberson has been on death row in Texas for more than 20 years for violently shaking his 2-year-old daughter Nikki to death.
Roberson is scheduled to be executed on October 17. If he were to die by lethal injection, he would become the first person in the United States to be executed on the basis of "shaken baby syndrome" - a medical hypothesis from the 1970s that has been widely debunked as a form of bogus science.
"What's so great about Robert's case is there was no crime," Grisham told reporters. "In most death penalty cases there's murder and somebody did it, but in Robert's case there was no crime and yet we're about to kill somebody for it in Texas. It's so frustrating."
Grisham's comments came as Roberson's attorneys filed a 62-page petition for clemency with the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole, calling for his death sentence to be commuted. The petition is a last chance for the inmate, who now is at the mercy of the courts or Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, to whom the board reports.
As his October 17 execution date approaches, Roberson's options are running out. Last week, the Texas Criminal Court denied his appeal.
The petition boldly argues for Roberson's innocence, stating that this is not a case of convicting the wrong man, but rather a case in which the crime for which he was accused never occurred. It states: "There was no offense ... Mr. Roberson is factually innocent of the offense for which he was convicted and sentenced to death based on pseudoscience that has since been discredited."
Grisham said he wanted to get involved in the campaign to save Roberson's life because "I'm just really angry about these cases. I can't let them go, I think about them all the time. Especially a case like Roberts, where we're still a month away, the clock is ticking, and yet we have clear scientific evidence that he did not kill Nikki."
The author began his life as a criminal defense attorney in a small town in Mississippi. He wrote his first novel, A Time to Kill, in 1989 and went on to have a string of bestsellers.
In 2006, he wrote his first nonfiction book, The Innocent Man, about Ron Williamson, who was wrongly convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to death in Oklahoma until his exoneration in 1999. Grisham then joined the boards of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, which have helped exonerate at least 200 people sentenced to death in the United States over the past half century.
His next book, Framed, which comes out two days before Roberson's scheduled execution, is a nonfiction work that tells 10 true stories of people wrongly convicted by a system skewed by racism, corruption and flawed testimony. "I'm up to my ears in wrongful convictions," he said.
Grisham isn't the only public figure backing Roberson in his latest countdown to death. More than 30 leading scientists and doctors, a cross-party group of 84 Texas lawmakers, 70 attorneys who have represented clients wrongly accused of child abuse, and a range of autism advocacy groups on Tuesday threw their support behind this latest effort to delay the prisoner's sentence.
The clemency petition argues that Roberson's conviction was based on three serious errors. When Nikki was rushed to the hospital in a coma in February 2002, medical staff concluded that she had been violently shaken without looking at her actual medical records.
On the back of that initial mistake, law enforcement and doctors failed to investigate further. As a result, they missed critical symptoms, including that the girl was ill with a fever of 104.5F (40.3C) shortly before passing out, had undiagnosed pneumonia, and had been given medications that have since been deemed life-threatening for children - all of which could explain her serious condition.
The third error, the petition argues, is that detectives and medical personnel who came into contact with Roberson were unaware that he was autistic, and interpreted his inexpressive behavior as the behavior of a ruthless killer rather than a result of his condition.
Brian Wharton, the lead detective on the case who testified against Roberson at trial, now believes the entire prosecution he led was based on a fallacy. He told the Guardian last year: "There was no crime scene, no forensic evidence. It was just three words: shaken baby syndrome. Without those words, he would be a free man today."
Shaken baby syndrome, or SBS for short, is a theory of child abuse that arose in the early 1970s. It was promoted as an explanation for why some children presented with severe, and sometimes fatal, illness with signs of internal head trauma but little or no signs of external injury.
An early proponent of the theory was a British pediatric neurosurgeon, Norman Guthkelch, who suggested in 1971 that violent shaking of the infant might be a possible cause. The concept spread rapidly until it reached the status of common knowledge.
Since then, however, leading scientists have questioned the reliability of SBS, both as a medical diagnosis and as a forensic methodology used in criminal cases. More than 80 alternative nonviolent causes of the symptoms have been identified, including deficits and disease - both of which were evident in Nikki's case.
So much doubt has been cast on the syndrome that many authorities now consider it unreliable, including Guthkelch himself, who has expressed concern about how the theory has been used to prosecute thousands of parents for child abuse. Concerns have spread through the criminal justice system, and 32 individuals convicted on the SBS have been exonerated since 1993, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Grisham compared Roberson's case to that of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed by Texas in 2004 for the murders of his three young children. Willingham was accused of setting the family's home on fire, based on forensic arson theories that were proven bogus.
"Twenty years ago, Texas executed a man for a crime that never happened," Grisham said. "Now, 20 years later, we're back to square one where no crime happened and the science has been debunked. Texas is about to execute another innocent man."
