The machinery of the Texas state killing apparatus, overseen by Republican Governor Greg Abbott and his attorney general, Ken Paxton, has suffered a setback in its campaign to execute Robert Roberson, an innocent and disabled man. Just days before his scheduled execution on October 16, 2025, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) granted Roberson a stay, sending his case back to the district court for further review.

Robert Roberson was convicted and sentenced to death in the 2002 death of his two-year-old daughter Nikki, based on medical testimony diagnosing Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS). The CCA granted Roberson a stay of execution and remanded his case to the trial court to consider his request for relief based on the precedent set in Ex parte Roark. Roberson must try to demonstrate that the new scientific evidence warrants relief, which could ultimately lead to a new trial and possible exoneration.

Roberson is seeking relief under Texas’ “junk science statute,” Article 11.073, which allows prisoners to challenge convictions based on scientific evidence that is now outdated, debunked or has evolved. The evidence in question leading to Roberson’s conviction involved charges by prosecutors that Nikki died of SBS.

Texas death row inmate Andrew Roark was convicted in 2000 of child injury based on an SBS diagnosis. In 2024, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) overturned his conviction under Article 11.073, concluding that new scientific evidence had discredited the shaken baby syndrome theory used at his original trial.

Andrew Roark was granted a new trial and subsequently exonerated, creating a significant legal precedent that now influences ongoing reconsideration of similar convictions, including Robert Roberson’s.

The CCA’s reasoning for halting Roberson’s execution centered on the fact that the government’s original case was “inseparably intertwined with Shaken Baby Syndrome as it was medically understood more than 20 years ago.” Given the “deeper understanding” of this “junk science,” the court acknowledged that previous assumptions might no longer be true. Stating that “A death sentence is clearly final” and requires the “highest standards of accuracy,” the court found Roberson deserves a new hearing to present evidence regarding the discredited SBS diagnosis.

There is a clear parallel between the Roberson and Roark cases. Both involved convictions based on the now-discredited SBS hypothesis. Roberson’s attorney, Gretchen Sween, is confident that an objective review of the medical evidence in his case will show “there was no crime.”

The next step is for the case to return to the trial court level, where Roberson must try to demonstrate that the new scientific evidence warrants relief, which could ultimately lead to a new trial. The outcome depends on whether the relief granted to Roark requires the same for Roberson.

The discredited science of SBS and AHT

Roberson’s conviction was based on medical testimony diagnosing SBS as the cause of his daughter’s death based on a triad of symptoms: subdural hemorrhages (SDH), retinal hemorrhages (RH) and encephalopathy (brain swelling).

However, the scientific understanding of SBS has evolved dramatically over that last two decades. Roberson’s defense argues that Nikki’s death was the tragic result of undiagnosed severe pneumonia — both bacterial and viral — that progressed to sepsis, a condition likely exacerbated by inappropriate medications prescribed to her: promethazine, a first-generation antihistamine, and codeine, an opioid. These drugs are no longer recommended for young children due to respiratory complications.

Additionally, modern research shows that the injury triad can result from non-abusive causes, including accidental short falls or other medical conditions. Roberson reported that Nikki had fallen out of bed the night before he rushed her to the emergency room.

The term “Abusive Head Trauma” (AHT) is now commonly used to describe what was previously referred to as SBS. While AHT is a broader diagnosis defined as injury resulting from blunt force, forceful shaking, or a combination of both, the older term SBS specifically referred to injuries caused primarily by violent shaking, often identified solely by the presence of the triad of symptoms. 

At least 41 people have been exonerated in the US after being wrongfully convicted based on the SBS hypothesis, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. If Texas succeeds in executing Roberson, he would be the first person in the US executed for a conviction based on SBS.

Further mitigating factors underscore Roberson’s innocence. Roberson suffers from autism spectrum disorder. His observed lack of emotional reaction and “flat affect” at the hospital, which was used by prosecutors to paint him as a “callous liar,” is now understood by experts and advocates as behavior symptomatic of his condition. Even Brian Wharton, the former lead detective who initially investigated the case, now believes Roberson is innocent, admitting, “We got it wrong” due to misinterpreting Roberson’s behavior and being fed “incomplete and bad information.”

Additionally, Roberson’s trial was corrupted by judicial misconduct that only recently came to light in the NBC News podcast “The Last Appeal,” released in October 2025. Judge Bascom Bentley, who presided over Roberson’s 2003 capital murder trial, had previously authorized Nikki’s maternal grandparents to remove her from life support. Under Texas law, Roberson, as Nikki’s sole managing conservator, was the only one with the legal authority to make that decision. Roberson’s attorneys argue that Judge Bentley’s failure to disclose this conflict of interest and recuse himself constitutes “structural error” requiring a new trial. As his lawyer noted, this is “glaring, undisclosed evidence of bias” discovered only days before his scheduled execution.

Adding to the travesty at trial, psychologist Thomas Allen testified that Roberson was a “psychopath,” listing Adolf Hitler and serial killer Ted Bundy as examples with the same condition. This label relied on a controversial checklist and unsubstantiated sexual assault accusations, creating an impossible-to-remove prejudice against him in the eyes of the jury.

The World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly denounced the death penalty as a barbaric institution used to shore up ruling class power under conditions of burgeoning social inequality and the drive to dictatorship.

The system’s callous indifference to Roberson’s innocence—and its relentless pursuit of his death—is the domestic expression of the same ruling class that oversees imperialist wars and genocidal violence abroad, including the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. The drive to execute Roberson further demonstrates Texas authorities’ disdain for due process and use of capital punishment as a terrorizing bludgeon against the population based on retribution and revenge.

Grim figures on state killings

The delayed execution of Roberson comes amid a boom in state-sponsored killings. So far in 2025, the US has carried out 35 executions across 10 states, with 11 more scheduled for the remainder of the year, marking the highest number in more than a decade.

States carrying out executions so far in 2025 include:

• Florida (13, lethal injection)
• Texas (5, lethal injection)
• Alabama (3, nitrogen gas hypoxia; 1, lethal injection)
• Indiana (2 by lethal injection)
• Tennessee (2, lethal injection)
• South Carolina (2, lethal injection; 2 firing squad)
• Oklahoma (2, lethal injection)
• Arizona (1, lethal injection)
• Louisiana (1, nitrogen gas hypoxia)
• Mississippi (1, lethal injection)

Governor Abbott has personally overseen 77 executions. Since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 the US has sent 1,642 people to their deaths, with Texas accounting for a staggering 596 of these.

Like many defendants sentenced to death, Robert Roberson has faced multiple execution dates in his more than two decades on death row: October 17, 2024, October 16, 2024, and October 16, 2025. This perpetual confrontation with death amounts to psychological torture, which constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, banned by the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution.

Neither of the two major big business parties opposes this assembly line of state killings. Notably, the Democratic Party removed its previous reference to opposition to the death penalty from its 2024 election platform, lending tacit support to this barbaric practice.

Donald Trump presided over the executions of an unprecedented 13 federal death row inmates during his first administration, including three executions carried out between his January 6, 2021, coup attempt and his departure from office. On Inauguration Day of his second term Trump signed a sweeping executive order on executions aimed at restoring and expanding the federal death penalty.

As the US wrote on October 17, 2024, after Roberson received his second eleventh-hour reprieve:

The World Socialist Web Site has a long record of covering and opposing the more than 1,600 executions which have taken place since the death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court in 1976. We have published more than 300 articles opposing and exposing the plight of those who have paid the ultimate price at the hands of this oppressive system of class rule.

The continued existence of the death penalty in the United States exposes the criminality and violence of the entire capitalist political and economic system. Robert Roberson must be set free and this long-outmoded punishment, meted out overwhelming against the working class and the poor, must be abolished.