Texas may well execute soon an innocent man on the false premise of "shaken baby syndrome". [1] He would be the first in US history.
This article was written by the police officer who helped send Robert Roberson to the death row in 2003. He changed his mind since then.
John Grisham has also written about this case. [2]
Please spread the word. As the retired police officer wrote:
> It would be a terrible legacy for all of us to be associated with executing an innocent man based on a rush to judgment and bad science. We must prevent Texas from making a tragic, irreversible mistake.
I always find the phrasing of these posts weird, as if we have to pretend that Texas has not executed innocent people before and this would be a first.
on edit: not just the post, but the articles, we must pretend that of course this would be a first time event that would otherwise sully the fine nature of the criminal justice system with accidentally murdering someone.
I think the point is in this case, it can indeed be stopped since executions, once done, can't be undone. It's not an academic topic, it's a life and death topic, a basic morality issue. The current Texas government is quite corrupt, particularly Ken Paxton, the attorney general, but I'm not sure that matters here other than as a tangential point of data.
> It would be a terrible legacy for all of us to be associated with executing an innocent man based on a rush to judgment and bad science. We must prevent Texas from making a tragic, irreversible mistake.
I believe that this statement is making specific reference to this particular case. (I miss-read this next part, but will leave my mistake here with this comment. See below conversation. Sorry for the confusion) Earlier in the article it is made very clear that this has not been the only execution of an innocent person wrongly accused of shaken baby syndrome:
> According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there have been at least 32 exonerations of those wrongfully convicted under the shaken baby hypothesis.
And then you go to Supreme Court, and SCOTUS says:
> The Constitution, Scalia wrote, does not prevent the government from executing a person who new evidence indicates might be “actually innocent” — that is, someone with the potential to legally demonstrate they did not commit the crime for which they were convicted.
And have locked in on this:
> In Shinn v. Ramirez, the court voted 6 to 3 to overrule two lower courts and disregard the innocence claims of Barry Lee Jones, a prisoner on Arizona’s death row. Importantly, the majority did not rule that it found Jones’s innocence claims unpersuasive. Instead, it ruled that the federal courts are barred from even considering them. Thomas wrote the opinion.
> A proper remedy for claim of actual innocence based on new evidence, which is discovered too late to file a new trial motion, would be not federal habeas relief, but rather to file for executive clemency with the state.
> Shinn does not affect “new factual predicate” claims. If a witness changes their story 5 years after trial, you can still validly raise that claim both as a subsequent state writ and as a 2254 federal petition. Same goes for new scientific evidence, Brady violations, etc. None of those things can be characterized as the defendant's fault for not raising them earlier.
> federal courts should show enormous deference to the states, even when federal judges believe a state court is wrong.
These decisions seems more about federalism? I mean, if you want to blame someone, blame the involved state for not considering the exculpatory evidence. For example Barry Lee Jones is out now - but it is because of an Arizona judge, not a federal one.
> someone with the potential to legally demonstrate they did not commit the crime for which they were convicted
that includes everyone convicted of a crime, all of the time.
unless you think due process requires endless appeals, you probably agree with Scalia
Shinn v. Ramirez overturns Martinez v. Ryan, use the state court instead. where in the constitution does it say there is federal jurisdiction for that kind of claim?
If that was his real stance, and someone who does believe in up and down, I think he is burning in hell for being in position of power to stop, but went on to kill innocent people.
Also in subject of death row, recently watched rather good movie based on true events: Trial by Fire. Interesting how that case was based on pseudo-science and even thought the governor knew he still let Cameron to be executed.
> We must prevent Texas from making a tragic, irreversible mistake.
Another tragic, irreversible mistake. The man has already been on death row for two decades. Imagine spending 20 years in a cell waiting to be executed because people believe you murdered your own child. Nothing will undo the kind of damage that does to a person, nor will anything make up for the years lost.
I'd struggle to come up with something more cruel. Honestly I'd consider it merciful to kill someone immediately rather than putting them through decades of psychological torture. At least that would only be barbaric.
Several innocent people die from being imprisoned every day.
No one cares, because they die in the prison infirmary, but they're just as dead and they were killed because of their conviction, just like they were executed. (No, I'm not talking about folks on death row, although innocents on death row also die in the infirmary.)
Not only do we kill more innocents that way in absolute numbers, it's also greater in percentage numbers. (Death penalty cases get lots of review. We can argue about whether it's enough, but it's far more review than life without parole, not to mention lesser sentences which end up being life.)
This kind of argument is exhausting. I don't know if there's a name for it or if there's some kind of "razor" for it, like; "Moving in any direction of bettering things is always going to be confronted by someone who thinks it's not good enough and there's some far bigger problem somewhere else so let me distract from the actual good that's trying to be done here"
To the actual point - I do think there's a difference between inmates dying in prison for other reasons (and we should reduce those) vs. sentencing someone to execution for a crime they didn't commit.
Part of the issue is that the United States has 25% of the world's prison population and only 6% of Total population the world. When you are the jailingest country in the world per capita by a large margin - More than Russia, Saudi Arabia, iran - You got the question how flippantly we put people in a cage.
In Ohio, a man was arrested for murder 16 years after being convicted of shaking a baby (and subsequently serving another prison term) when the "baby" died from complications. The "baby" (young adult at passing) was severely disabled their whole life.
The death penalty should be abolished. You don't get sentenced to death for harming others, you get sentenced to death for being unsympathetic to the jury (because of racism or, as in this case, because you don't appear to exhibit the right emotions) and for not having enough money to afford a good lawyer.
You can die from being poor in a bunch of different ways in this country, but this is one we could easily eliminate.
I think we need to find another way or some kind of middle solution.
Like in the situation where everyone knows this person did crime X or Y (for example lets say murdered several children) we can just immediately execute them via hanging or firing squad (quickly) instead of letting them sit in prison for a decade+ while we "wait" on their lethal injection nonsense to go down.
The tricky part is having a fool proof system where we only execute people where the evidence is 100% and then perhaps multiple independent review panels also agree all evidence points to yeah they did it or the criminal themselves admits to the crimes.
Some kind of system where everyone executed has been universally agreed upon as guilty.
A sentence of death should be swift, agreed upon by all, and not a criminal spending decades in prison wasting tax payers money.
Virtually Western democracies support death penalty besides the US and Japan. It literally puts us in a lot with the countries. We consider it to be backwards (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia).
I don't think Americans sometimes realize how radical of an outlier we are to the rest of the world on this and many other issues, including probably most notably, basic social policy.
Yes, the only real argument against the 100% cases that I've ever heard is that there would be fewer people admitting to murder if they knew that they would be killed. But I think this shouldn't bother us, so what if fewer people confess? I think most confessions are already only done when they see themselves having no other choice than admitting what they did.
Also we are talking about the 100% cases, people who e.g publically shot someone or are so mentally ill or stupid that they confess anyway where by definition we might not even need to wait for a confession.
I think most people who are against the death penalty are not fully honest with their opposition, consciously or subconsciously. Outwardly they say that they oppose it due to the danger of innocents being hurt. But inwardly I suspect a far less well intentioned reason because we see an indication for this in the release of murderers from prison after only ~15 years sometimes. What genuinely moral person would ever support the release of a murderer? But see, if we don't execute murderers immediately it starts a whole process in humans. They see the suffering of the murderer in prison and they feel bad. It's automatic, they can't turn it off. This the kind of automatic biological pity when you see someone suffering which is not a good kind of pity in this case. This person murdered another human being, his life should be forfeit. But then an even sicker consideration starts coming into play: The humans who see this other human (murderer) suffering say: Well, this is a waste! This too is inevitable thinking in humans. We see a human being who seems to behave well now, in a cage, and seems to be nice and you can talk normally to them over topics like the weather and family and suddenly the thought comes that this is an economic waste. Then society suddenly has a big, daily economic incentive to release him. This is why I support the death penalty to be carried out immediately, we cannot trust people to be objective about pain and suffering, especially not decades after the committed murder when the wounds aren't fresh anymore. But the victim cannot talk and plead for justice.
This sounds like legally it would make things even harder.
At the moment, in principle you are only convicted if you guilt is "beyond a reasonable doubt". That already has to be done by a jury.
How do we decide if someone is "universally agreed upon" to be guilty? Bigger jury? Also, it would be weird to have a jury say "This person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but not universally agreed upon".
That requires so much trust in the people in power. People who have demonstrated repeatedly throughout history that they don't deserve blanket trust. It's like suggesting lynch mobs never got it wrong.
I guess the bigger problem is jury trial. Jury trial exists when there is a lack of evidence and the prosecutor wants to charge based on his feelings/agenda or whatever. It's a corrupt system and the public is entertaining the whole ordeal.
As I understand it, death penalty cases need a special jury, consisting of people who approve of the death penalty. Also, in practical terms, they need an incompetent defense lawyer.
Death penalty in the US seems like a remnant of slavery more than anything else. I guess the same could be said for much of the US government (polices, judicial system, etc)
Not only convicted under the highly controversial shaken baby syndrome theory (not straightforward to prove; hence erronous) and ignoring medical evidence but his undiagnosed autism led to unfair judgments of his behavior... irreversible errors in the US justice system.
Maybe it's high time to overthink the death penalty?
I have what I believe to be an adequate criteria for inflicting the death penalty:
1. A person has to commit and be convicted of, and sentenced for a (potentially) capital crime.
2. That person has to escape from their final prison.
3. That person must then commit, and be convicted of another capital crime (probably with some mitigating circumstances, like murders that are arguably part of the escape and evasion don't qualify for the death penalty, but escaping, then going out of your way to murder a civilian do).
For most bad crimes, life without parole is more than adequate. And if you escape and dedicate yourself to keeping your nose clean, then the worst you should face is an extended sentence. The death penalty should be reserved for people who pose such a proven, dire risk to society that the goal of the punishment is risk mitigation for society, not justice. Ted Bundy is the best real-world example I can think of.
Are you telling me that shaking babies doesn't kill them?
> undiagnosed autism
I think autism mild enough to not be diagnosed cannot possibly excuse somebody for shaking a baby, and as somebody with autism so mild that it went undiagnosed for 30 years I'm personally offended that anybody could believe otherwise.
Any parent knows that toddlers are constantly bashing thier heads off things because they’re top heavy and learning to walk they constantly fall over and tumble off things. One of my daughters used to constantly have a lump on her head from smacking it off something. My friends son used to run full tilt into things like brick walls given half a chance, the noise it made was awful. I stand to be corrected on this but if I remember rightly the male scientist who came up with shaken baby syndrome didn’t have kids and hadn’t considered the possibility that these types of injuries could be self inflicted.
I don't know if Norman Guthkelch and John Caffey had kids, but Caffey wrote in his 1972 paper:
> Rhythmic whiplash habits of the infant himself during the first months of life, such as head-rolling, body-rocking, and head-banging may be traumatically pathogenic to his brain and its veins.
More generally, Caffey considered many types of mild shaking to be potentially dangerous, including "toys and recreational contraptions", "playful practices" etc. The notion that shaking had to be "abusive" to be pathogenic came in the 10 years afterwards.
not much you can do about water that's under the bridge, I think at this point he's like to get to step one "get out of prison because I'm innocent", at that point he can get possible compensation, which is pretty low in texas.
Readit News
This article was written by the police officer who helped send Robert Roberson to the death row in 2003. He changed his mind since then.
John Grisham has also written about this case. [2]
Please spread the word. As the retired police officer wrote:
> It would be a terrible legacy for all of us to be associated with executing an innocent man based on a rush to judgment and bad science. We must prevent Texas from making a tragic, irreversible mistake.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-may-execute-a-man-based-o...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/texas-death-ro...
[4] https://eu.statesman.com/story/opinion/columns/guest/2024/05...
on edit: not just the post, but the articles, we must pretend that of course this would be a first time event that would otherwise sully the fine nature of the criminal justice system with accidentally murdering someone.
Dead Comment
I believe that this statement is making specific reference to this particular case. (I miss-read this next part, but will leave my mistake here with this comment. See below conversation. Sorry for the confusion) Earlier in the article it is made very clear that this has not been the only execution of an innocent person wrongly accused of shaken baby syndrome:
> According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there have been at least 32 exonerations of those wrongfully convicted under the shaken baby hypothesis.
> The Constitution, Scalia wrote, does not prevent the government from executing a person who new evidence indicates might be “actually innocent” — that is, someone with the potential to legally demonstrate they did not commit the crime for which they were convicted.
And have locked in on this:
> In Shinn v. Ramirez, the court voted 6 to 3 to overrule two lower courts and disregard the innocence claims of Barry Lee Jones, a prisoner on Arizona’s death row. Importantly, the majority did not rule that it found Jones’s innocence claims unpersuasive. Instead, it ruled that the federal courts are barred from even considering them. Thomas wrote the opinion.
> A proper remedy for claim of actual innocence based on new evidence, which is discovered too late to file a new trial motion, would be not federal habeas relief, but rather to file for executive clemency with the state.
https://www.pullanyoung.com/blog/dont-panic-over-shinn-v-ram...
> Shinn does not affect “new factual predicate” claims. If a witness changes their story 5 years after trial, you can still validly raise that claim both as a subsequent state writ and as a 2254 federal petition. Same goes for new scientific evidence, Brady violations, etc. None of those things can be characterized as the defendant's fault for not raising them earlier.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/01/arizona-d...
> federal courts should show enormous deference to the states, even when federal judges believe a state court is wrong.
These decisions seems more about federalism? I mean, if you want to blame someone, blame the involved state for not considering the exculpatory evidence. For example Barry Lee Jones is out now - but it is because of an Arizona judge, not a federal one.
that includes everyone convicted of a crime, all of the time.
unless you think due process requires endless appeals, you probably agree with Scalia
Shinn v. Ramirez overturns Martinez v. Ryan, use the state court instead. where in the constitution does it say there is federal jurisdiction for that kind of claim?
Also in subject of death row, recently watched rather good movie based on true events: Trial by Fire. Interesting how that case was based on pseudo-science and even thought the governor knew he still let Cameron to be executed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_Fire_(2018_film)
Another tragic, irreversible mistake. The man has already been on death row for two decades. Imagine spending 20 years in a cell waiting to be executed because people believe you murdered your own child. Nothing will undo the kind of damage that does to a person, nor will anything make up for the years lost.
I'd struggle to come up with something more cruel. Honestly I'd consider it merciful to kill someone immediately rather than putting them through decades of psychological torture. At least that would only be barbaric.
No one cares, because they die in the prison infirmary, but they're just as dead and they were killed because of their conviction, just like they were executed. (No, I'm not talking about folks on death row, although innocents on death row also die in the infirmary.)
Not only do we kill more innocents that way in absolute numbers, it's also greater in percentage numbers. (Death penalty cases get lots of review. We can argue about whether it's enough, but it's far more review than life without parole, not to mention lesser sentences which end up being life.)
To the actual point - I do think there's a difference between inmates dying in prison for other reasons (and we should reduce those) vs. sentencing someone to execution for a crime they didn't commit.
Dead Comment
You can die from being poor in a bunch of different ways in this country, but this is one we could easily eliminate.
Like in the situation where everyone knows this person did crime X or Y (for example lets say murdered several children) we can just immediately execute them via hanging or firing squad (quickly) instead of letting them sit in prison for a decade+ while we "wait" on their lethal injection nonsense to go down.
The tricky part is having a fool proof system where we only execute people where the evidence is 100% and then perhaps multiple independent review panels also agree all evidence points to yeah they did it or the criminal themselves admits to the crimes.
Some kind of system where everyone executed has been universally agreed upon as guilty.
A sentence of death should be swift, agreed upon by all, and not a criminal spending decades in prison wasting tax payers money.
I don't think Americans sometimes realize how radical of an outlier we are to the rest of the world on this and many other issues, including probably most notably, basic social policy.
I think most people who are against the death penalty are not fully honest with their opposition, consciously or subconsciously. Outwardly they say that they oppose it due to the danger of innocents being hurt. But inwardly I suspect a far less well intentioned reason because we see an indication for this in the release of murderers from prison after only ~15 years sometimes. What genuinely moral person would ever support the release of a murderer? But see, if we don't execute murderers immediately it starts a whole process in humans. They see the suffering of the murderer in prison and they feel bad. It's automatic, they can't turn it off. This the kind of automatic biological pity when you see someone suffering which is not a good kind of pity in this case. This person murdered another human being, his life should be forfeit. But then an even sicker consideration starts coming into play: The humans who see this other human (murderer) suffering say: Well, this is a waste! This too is inevitable thinking in humans. We see a human being who seems to behave well now, in a cage, and seems to be nice and you can talk normally to them over topics like the weather and family and suddenly the thought comes that this is an economic waste. Then society suddenly has a big, daily economic incentive to release him. This is why I support the death penalty to be carried out immediately, we cannot trust people to be objective about pain and suffering, especially not decades after the committed murder when the wounds aren't fresh anymore. But the victim cannot talk and plead for justice.
At the moment, in principle you are only convicted if you guilt is "beyond a reasonable doubt". That already has to be done by a jury.
How do we decide if someone is "universally agreed upon" to be guilty? Bigger jury? Also, it would be weird to have a jury say "This person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but not universally agreed upon".
Gender matters more than just about anything else in sentencing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentencing_disparity
What to Know About Robert Roberson on Texas Death Row for a Crime That Never Occurred
https://innocenceproject.org/what-to-know-about-robert-rober...
Maybe it's high time to overthink the death penalty?
1. A person has to commit and be convicted of, and sentenced for a (potentially) capital crime. 2. That person has to escape from their final prison. 3. That person must then commit, and be convicted of another capital crime (probably with some mitigating circumstances, like murders that are arguably part of the escape and evasion don't qualify for the death penalty, but escaping, then going out of your way to murder a civilian do).
For most bad crimes, life without parole is more than adequate. And if you escape and dedicate yourself to keeping your nose clean, then the worst you should face is an extended sentence. The death penalty should be reserved for people who pose such a proven, dire risk to society that the goal of the punishment is risk mitigation for society, not justice. Ted Bundy is the best real-world example I can think of.
Are you telling me that shaking babies doesn't kill them?
> undiagnosed autism
I think autism mild enough to not be diagnosed cannot possibly excuse somebody for shaking a baby, and as somebody with autism so mild that it went undiagnosed for 30 years I'm personally offended that anybody could believe otherwise.
> Rhythmic whiplash habits of the infant himself during the first months of life, such as head-rolling, body-rocking, and head-banging may be traumatically pathogenic to his brain and its veins.
More generally, Caffey considered many types of mild shaking to be potentially dangerous, including "toys and recreational contraptions", "playful practices" etc. The notion that shaking had to be "abusive" to be pathogenic came in the 10 years afterwards.
(And IIRC, the character being talked about ends up being very important later on, so it was good that they weren't killed.)
The state has already taken prime years of life (age 36-56). The potential execution just seems like salt in that wound.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/was-an-innocent-man-exe...