A death row inmate who was set to become the first person in the country executed in a shaken baby syndrome case was spared for the time being after a Texas criminal appeals court stayed his execution for a third time.
Robert Roberson, 57, was granted the stay by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Thursday — putting off his scheduled Oct. 16 lethal injection — based on the state’s 2013 Junk Science Writ, which would allow a reexamination of forensic evidence his lawyers believe will prove his 2-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis was not murdered.
“Robert adored Nikki, whose death was a tragedy, a horror compounded by Robert’s wrongful conviction that devastated his whole family,” his attorney Gretchen Sween said in a statement.
Texas’s top criminal court paused the execution of Robert Roberson, just days before he was set to become the first person in the U.S. put to death for a murder conviction tied to shaken baby syndrome. AP
This was the third execution date that Roberson’s lawyers have been able to stay since 2016, including one scheduled nearly a year ago. AP
“We are confident that an objective review of the science and medical evidence will show there was no crime.”
Since little Nikki was found dead in 2002, Roberson has maintained his innocence.
“I never shook her or hit her,” he told the Associated Press in an interview last week.
Robert Roberson speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit prison in Livingston, Texas, on Oct. 1, 2025. APRoberson’s lawyers have provided medical experts who claimed Curtis died from complications from pneumonia and that the medical examiner’s autopsy report, which concluded she died from blunt force trauma to the head, was “not reliable.”
Despite the claims, other family members of Nikki maintained that Roberson had a history of hitting the girl.
Roberson had been scheduled to receive a lethal injection on Oct. 16 for the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis. APThree pediatricians, including two from the Yale School of Medicine, wrote in a Sept. 26 op-ed in The Dallas Morning News that Nikki was clearly the victim of child abuse, while also opining that he should not be executed.
Nikki’s medical autopsy “reveal[ed] clear evidence of blunt force head trauma. She had generalized brain swelling, extensive bleeding over the surface of her brain, multiple bloody impact sites under her scalp, bleeding in her eyes, bruises on her face and the back of her head, bruising on her shoulder, and bleeding into the muscles of her back and neck under her shoulder,” the doctors wrote.
“Her medical evaluation and autopsy clearly indicate a violent and traumatic death.”
The stay of execution was a boon to a swath of the convicted child killer’s supporters — including bestselling author John Girsham, Texas GOP megadonor Doug Deason, and the former lead detective on Roberson’s case, Brian Wharton.
Roberson’s attorneys allege the judge who presided over the trial didn’t disclose that he also authorized the circumvention of Roberson’s parental rights and allowed Nikki’s grandparents to remove her from life support. APWharton said in a recent Innocence Project video that he was “100% convinced that Robert is an innocent man.”
GOP state Rep. Brian Harrison praised the stay from the other side of the political aisle.
“These brave judges took their duty to seek justice seriously, even in the face of tremendous — and dishonest — political pressure to execute a potentially innocent person, who has never been given a fair trial,” Harrison said in a statement, the AP reported.
Since his first scheduled execution date over nine years ago, Roberson and his lawyers have filed multiple state and federal appeals — including with the Supreme Court — to fully halt the gears of justice from meting out a lethal injection.
Roberson’s case is now being sent back to his trial court in East Texas for review.
