Best-selling author John Grisham has joined a cross-party group of politicians, lawyers, scientists and doctors in warning that Texas is about to execute an innocent man convicted of a crime that was never committed.
Grisham, whose legal thrillers include The Firm and The Pelican Brief, have been the subject of Hollywood blockbusters, spoke Tuesday about the case of Robert Roberson, 57. Roberson had 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 Oct. 17. If he is executed by lethal injection, he would be the first person in the U.S. to be executed on the basis of “shaken baby syndrome” — a medical hypothesis from the 1970s that has been widely debunked as a kind of junk science.
“The amazing thing about Robert’s case is there was no crime,” Grisham told reporters. “Most death penalty cases, there’s a murder and someone did it, but in Robert’s case there was no crime and yet here we are in Texas about to kill someone for it. It’s very frustrating.”
Grisham’s comments came as Roberson’s attorneys filed a 62-page petition to the Texas Pardons and Parole Board seeking to commute his death sentence. The petition is a final shot at the inmate, who is now at the mercy of the courts or Texas Governor Greg Abbott, to whom the board reports.
Roberson’s options are running out as his execution date approaches on Oct. 17. Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected his appeal.
The petition explicitly argues that Roberson’s innocence is not a case of the wrong man being convicted, but rather that the crime he is accused of never happened. It states: “No crime was committed… Mr. Roberson is essentially innocent of the crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to death based on pseudo-science that has since been discredited.”
Grisham said she wanted to join the campaign to save Roberson’s life because “I have a real anger about these cases.” “I can’t let them go, I think about them all the time. Especially in a case like Roberts, we’re a month away, time is running out, and yet we have clear scientific evidence that he didn’t kill Nikki.”
The author began his career 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 write a series of bestsellers.
In 2006, she wrote her first nonfiction book, The Innocent Man, about Ron Williamson, who was wrongfully convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to death in Oklahoma until his acquittal in 1999. From there, Grisham joined the board of directors of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, which have helped exonerate at least 200 people from the death penalty in the United States over the past half-century.
Roberson’s next book, Framed, due out two days before his scheduled execution, is a work of nonfiction that tells the true stories of 10 people wrongfully convicted by a system twisted by racism, corruption and faulty testimony. “I am up to my ears in wrongful convictions,” he said.
Grisham is not the only public figure to support Roberson in the final countdown to his death. More than 30 prominent scientists and doctors, a bipartisan group of 84 Texas lawmakers, 70 attorneys representing clients wrongfully accused of child abuse and several autism advocacy groups backed the latest effort to pardon the inmate on Tuesday.
The clemency petition argues that Roberson’s conviction was based on three serious errors. When Nikki was admitted to the hospital in a coma in February 2002, medical staff concluded that she was severely convulsed without looking at her actual medical record.
Following this initial error, law enforcement officers and doctors failed to investigate further. As a result, they missed critical symptoms, including the girl being ill with a fever of 104.5F (40.3C) shortly before she lost consciousness, having undiagnosed pneumonia, and being given medications that have since been considered life-threatening for children – all of which could explain her dire condition.
The third mistake, the petition alleges, was that detectives and medical personnel who came into contact with Roberson, not knowing that he was autistic, interpreted his expressionless demeanor not as a product of his disorder but as the stance of an emotionless killer.
Brian Wharton, the lead detective who testified against Roberson in the case, now believes the entire prosecution he led was based on a delusion. He told the Guardian last year: “There was no crime scene, there was no forensic evidence. There were just three words: shaken baby syndrome. Without them he would be a free man today.”
Shaken baby syndrome, or SBS for short, is a child abuse theory that emerged in the early 1970s. It was accepted as an explanation for why some children present with severe and sometimes fatal illnesses that show signs of internal head trauma but little or no external injury.
One of the early proponents of the theory was British pediatric neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch, who suggested in 1971 that a violent shaking of the child could be a possible cause. The concept spread rapidly until it reached the status of accepted knowledge.
But since then, 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 short falls and illness—both of which were evident in Nikki’s case.
Suspicions about the syndrome have grown so much that many authorities now regard it as unreliable, including Guthkelch himself, who has expressed concern about how the theory has been used to prosecute thousands of parents for child abuse. The concern has spread to the criminal justice system, and according to the National Registry of Exonerations, 32 people convicted on the basis of SBS have been exonerated since 1993.
Grisham likened Roberson’s case to that of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed by Texas in 2004 for killing his three young children. Willingham was accused of setting fire to his family home based on forensic arson theories that turned out to be junk science.
“Twenty years ago, Texas executed a man for a crime that was never committed,” Grisham said. “Now here we are 20 years later, and we’ve come to another execution where there was no crime and the science has been disproved. Texas is about to execute another innocent man.”