The execution of Robert Roberson in Texas stays on monitor for Thursday, regardless of severe doubts that he killed and even mistreated his 2-year-old daughter in 2002.
Prosecutors and medical specialists insisted at trial that the kid’s head trauma was proof that Roberson had bodily abused her. However now the detective who testified in opposition to him says he believes Roberson is harmless, and a string of physicians argue that the “shaken baby syndrome” analysis that was commonplace medical doctrine on the time, and a key to Roberson’s conviction, is junk science and unreliable proof of abuse.
The idea is in such disrepute that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Oct. 9 overturned the conviction of another man, Andrew Roark, 25 years after he was discovered to have injured his girlfriend’s baby by extreme shaking. It’s unlikely a jury at the moment would purchase the shaken child argument in Roark’s case, the courtroom mentioned.
However Texas nonetheless plans to place Roberson to loss of life this week.
There might be no better perversion of justice than executing an individual when there may be severe doubt that she or he dedicated a criminal offense. Legal guidelines, courts, prosecutors, witnesses and juries are all a part of a system painstakingly crafted over centuries to ferret out the reality to ship justice. However as in Roberson’s case, the justice system generally appears extra involved with sustaining perception in its personal infallibility.
The case just isn’t a one-off. The identical day the Texas courtroom threw out Roark’s conviction, the U.S. Supreme Courtroom heard arguments within the case of Richard Glossip, who’s on loss of life row in Oklahoma regardless of severe doubts about his guilt. Everybody agrees that one other man, Justin Sneed, murdered Barry Van Treese in 1997 and agreed to testify in opposition to Glossip to keep away from the loss of life penalty. The justices should contemplate whether or not prosecutors tainted the conviction by failing to reveal that Sneed was being handled for a severe psychiatric situation and lied about it.
In the course of the arguments, Justice Clarence Thomas repeatedly expressed concern that the try and probably reveal Glossip’s innocence and spare his life was undermining justice — as a result of exposing misconduct or error might impugn the integrity of the prosecutors.
If a thousand years from now future scientists have been to look at American civilization of the early twenty first century, as anthropologists at the moment study the Aztec empire and different societies that ritually killed, they could moderately theorize that executions have been a part of the liturgy of democratic elections.
It might be an affordable connection to make on condition that within the months earlier than and after the 2020 presidential election, the federal authorities put 13 people to death from summer time by means of the election and after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol (which included a makeshift gallows maybe designated for the vp) till simply earlier than the inauguration.
And the anthropologists would see one other spate of executions, this one from Republican states, within the weeks earlier than the 2024 election (though in reality executions proceed in some states at a gradual tempo).
Along with Roberson in Texas, Derrick Dearman is scheduled to die Thursday in Alabama, though his execution has drawn much less consideration as a result of there isn’t any severe proof of innocence. It’s merely one other state killing.
And on Nov. 1, 4 days earlier than the election, Richard Bernard Moore is scheduled to die in South Carolina (the identical state ended its 13-year execution hiatus a month in the past by killing Freddie Owens). Moore has till Friday to resolve whether or not to die by deadly injection, execution or firing squad.
This can be very unlikely that the anthropologists will discover proof that the election season ritual killings protected us from no matter evil we feared. They might discover as an alternative that our cussed embrace of junk science equivalent to shaken child syndrome to safe conviction and execution and the reluctance of courts to acknowledge error, poisoned our religion in our justice system and introduced it down.
They might discover a hyperlink between the cheapening of fact in legal justice issues and the same phenomenon in our elections, the place the precise outcomes are threatened by a candidate’s willingness to lie about them with a straight face.
It might be fascinating to know the way a future society will examine us with different nations that additionally ship false justice within the type of capital punishment. For instance, Japanese officers a number of weeks in the past admitted misconduct within the case of Iwao Hakamada, now 88, convicted of a quadruple homicide and sentenced to loss of life in 1968.
Proof in opposition to him was faked, authorities lastly acknowledged, and he was acquitted final month. His life was stolen, his psychological well being destroyed. However not less than his exoneration got here whereas he was nonetheless alive.
Thank goodness, the anthropologists might say, that moreover Japan and america, most different rich, law-observing, civilized nations of the time preserved liberty, public security and confidence in establishments of justice with out ever placing human beings, both responsible or harmless, to loss of life.
