At 6pm next Thursday, barring a last-minute reprieve, Robert Roberson will become the first person in America to be executed under the theory of “shaken baby syndrome”, a medical diagnosis from the 1970s that is so disputed it is now widely denounced as junk science.
Roberson, 58, will enter the death chamber at the Huntsville unit in Texas, where he will be strapped to a gurney and injected with a cocktail of lethal drugs. He will be put to death having been convicted of shaking to death his two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis in 2002.
