If Texas follows through with its plans to impose the death penalty on Robert Roberson this October, it will become the first state in the country to execute someone whose conviction was based on what's commonly known as "shaken baby syndrome."
The former detective who arrested Roberson for murdering his 2-year-old daughter is no longer convinced that he did it. Roberson's attorneys say they have new evidence based on previously hidden medical records that his child really died of severe pneumonia, and they argue in a recently filed motion for a stay of execution that, since Roberson's trial, the theory behind shaken baby syndrome—now called abusive head trauma (AHT)—has "been entirely exposed as devoid of any scientific underpinnings."
