Texas' highest criminal court has stayed the execution of Robert Roberson, a death row inmate who was—for the second time in two years—less than a week away from becoming the first person in the country to be executed based on evidence of what used to be called "shaken baby syndrome."
In a two-page order, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) on Thursday granted Roberson's last-ditch request for a stay under a 2013 Texas law, known as the "junk science" writ, which allows new court proceedings for defendants to challenge convictions that relied on now-discredited forensic science. The CCA remanded Roberson's case to a lower trial court and cited an overturned conviction in another "shaken baby" case that featured testimony from one of the same expert witnesses as in Roberson's original trial.
