The Case of Robert Roberson

LAST FALL, AN extraordinary legal drama played out in Texas that shook the foun-dations of the death penalty in a state that still stands for hang-'em-high justice.Hours before he was scheduled to become the first person in the country to be executed based on evidence of what used to be called "shaken baby syndrome," Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson was granted an unprecedented reprieve when a state House committee subpoenaed him to testify before it.

- C.J. Ciaramella

Roberson did not testify because the committee and the Texas Department of Corrections couldn't agree on the logis-tics. In November, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that a legislative subpoena couldn't halt the execution. When this issue went to press, a new execution date had not been set for Roberson. But the unusual legisla-tive intervention and the high-stakes fight among the branches of Texas' government showed major, bipartisan doubts about the integrity of the death penalty.

Roberson was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 for murdering his 2-year-old daughter. A jury convicted him based largely on expert findings of shaken baby syndrome, which is now called abusive head trauma (AHT). Roberson claimed his daughter, who had been in and out of the emergency room in recent days because of illness, had fallen out of bed. Doctors and prosecutors said Roberson's daughter died of brain trauma caused by whiplash.