The Stay
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What is the case of Robert Roberson about?
Normally in just the news reporting business in general, you kind of have a sense of what at least are the options for what might happen. That was not the case for this story.
Kayla Guo is a reporter for the Texas Tribune. She's talking about the case of a man on death row named Robert Roberson. Robert Roberson was born in Mineola, Texas in 1966. In his 20s, he spent time in prison for burglary and passing bad checks. By his mid-30s, he was living in a small town between Houston and Dallas and had a job delivering newspapers. In the early 2000s, he learned that he had a daughter. Her name was Nikki, and he got custody of her just after she turned two. Her mother had lost custody soon after Nikki was born. Nikki had been sick for a lot of her life. By the time she was two, she'd been to the doctor more than 45 times. She had breathing problems and kept getting infections that were resistant to antibiotics.
In January of 2002, a couple of months after Nikki had started living with Robert, he took her to the emergency room. She'd been coughing and vomiting for days. A doctor prescribed a drug called Phenergan to help with her nausea. Nikki was sent home, but her temperature started going up. At the pediatrician's office the next day, her temperature was 104.5.
Her condition had only gotten worse, and she had been, again, sick for some time now.
She was prescribed more Phenergan, but this time it was in a cough syrup with codeine. At the same time, Robert's girlfriend was in the hospital, and so Nikki stayed with her maternal grandparents. Robert picked Nikki up the next night. Robert says when they got home, he made Nikki a snack, and they watched a movie together until they were falling asleep. Robert put Nikki to bed in his bed so she wouldn't be sleeping alone. Robert says that around 5 a.m., he woke up because he heard a strange cry and saw that Nikki had fallen out of the bed. He says he talked to her for two hours to make sure she was okay, and then they went back to sleep. He says that when his alarm went off around 9 a.m., He couldn't wake her up, even when he grabbed her face and shook it, and her lips were turning blue. So he rushed her to the emergency room at that point. At the hospital, doctors performed CPR and intubated Nikki. Hospital staff noticed a bump on the back of her head and performed a CAT scan, which showed blood between her brain and her skull.
The scan also showed brain swelling, but no fractures. Nikki was transferred to the Children's Medical Center in Dallas. Soon after she got there, she was given more scans. And she was also examined by a child abuse expert.
The doctors saw symptoms that, at that time, told them to diagnose shaken baby syndrome.
The idea of shaken baby syndrome first came about in the early 1970s, when a neurosurgeon in England started noticing that some of the infants and children he was treating had bleeding between the brain and the skull, without any outward signs of head injury. Social workers told him that they'd noticed parents attempting to discipline their babies by shaking them, and the neurosurgeon theorized that the mysterious bleeding could have been caused by shaking. A radiologist in Pennsylvania later came up with the term Whiplash Shaken Infant Syndrome. Eventually, it became a more formal diagnosis.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the case of Robert Roberson about?
1:03–6:10
2
How did the medical diagnosis affect Robert Roberson's trial?
6:10–15:41
3
What role did the Junk Science Law play in Robert's case?
15:41–19:06
4
How has the perception of shaken baby syndrome changed?
19:06–23:38
5
What new evidence was discovered in Robert Roberson's case?
23:38–33:21
6
What was the outcome of the new evidentiary hearing?
33:21–41:42