Podcast Stirs Up Even More Controversy in 'Shaken Baby' Execution

With just days before his scheduled execution, lawyers for Robert Roberson are urging Texas courts to reconsider his case, citing new evidence of judicial misconduct uncovered in a true-crime podcast that questions the fairness of his original trial. Roberson, 58, faces lethal injection for the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki, and would be the first US execution tied to the controversial "shaken baby syndrome" diagnosis, NBC News reports.

The latest wrinkle comes from an interview aired in The Last Appeal, a Dateline podcast, in which Nikki's grandfather, Larry Bowman, said Judge Bascom Bentley, who oversaw nearly all of Roberson's trial, called the hospital after Nikki's collapse, when Roberson had not yet been arrested or charged, and identified the Bowmans as Nikki's legal guardians—despite court records showing Roberson was her sole conservator. Bentley was calling in his role as a judiciary official to tell the hospital who to contact to authorize removing the child from life support, and in doing so, the Bowmans were allowed to make the life support decision, Click2Houston reports. Bentley later signed Roberson's arrest warrant and presided over much of his trial, a sequence Roberson's attorneys argue violated fundamental rights to an "impartial tribunal."

Roberson's lawyers say this behind-the-scenes role suggests Bentley prejudged Roberson's guilt and failed to recuse himself, tainting the trial. "It's shocking that we are discovering the truth ... only by chance, from a podcast, days before Robert is scheduled to be executed," Roberson's attorney said in a statement. State prosecutors, for their part, have held that Roberson murdered his daughter, a stance Attorney General Ken Paxton continues to defend, even as Roberson's team claims the "shaken baby syndrome" diagnosis has been discredited and the lead detective in the case says he now believes Roberson is innocent. Roberson, a single father after Nikki's mother lost custody, has long said Nikki's injuries resulted from a fall. "I got a lot of people believing in me," Roberson says in an interview published this week at the Texas Observer.