(CN) — One of the jurors who helped convict death row inmate Robert Roberson now believes he’s innocent, a Texas House panel heard Monday.
Terre Compton told the Texas Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence that, if she had the information that she has now when serving as a juror in the case, she would have voted not guilty.
Roberson was convicted in 2003 of murdering his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis. His case has attracted much attention among both Texas lawmakers and the general public, with his attorneys and some medical experts arguing that no crime was committed and that Nikki instead died of severe pneumonia.
Roberson was scheduled to be executed last Thursday, but a bipartisan group of lawmakers on the committee took the unprecedented step of subpoenaing him to testify before it in an effort to block the execution.
Roberson was scheduled to testify at the hearing Monday, but did not due to a dispute over whether he would be allowed to testify in person. Chair Joe Moody, a Democrat from El Paso, said at the start of the hearing that the committee was continuing to work with the state Attorney General’s Office to try to persuade it to let Roberson testify in person, arguing that virtual testimony would not be suitable for Roberson due to his autism diagnosis and lack of familiarity with modern technology.
Lawmakers at the hearing instead heard testimony on the case from a variety of witnesses, including TV host Dr. Phil, Roberson’s lawyers and a former Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judge.
Compton told the committee that when she saw in the news that Roberson’s execution date had been set, she started reading up on new evidence that had come out since the trial, which caused her to change her opinion on Roberson’s guilt and made her want to speak out.
“I could not live with myself thinking that I had a hand in putting an innocent man to death,” Compton said.
Central to this case has been the controversial theory of shaken baby syndrome, which refers to when an adult violently shakes a young child, causing significant brain damage due to the child’s brain slamming against the skull. While doctors once believed that a certain set of injuries pointed definitively to a child having been shaken, more recent research has shown that other causes can also lead to these same injuries.
In her testimony, Compton disputed claims from the state Attorney General’s Office that Roberson was not convicted of shaken baby syndrome but rather of beating his daughter to death, saying the claim that the case was about anything other than shaken baby syndrome “has pissed me off very much.”
“Everything that was presented to us was all about shaken baby syndrome,” Compton said. “That is what our decision was based on.”
Compton described the prosecutor bringing a teddy bear or baby doll into the courtroom and using it to demonstrate how Roberson must have shaken his daughter.
“They grabbed it by its arms like this,” Compton said, pantomiming what the prosecutor did to the toy. “And they just violently shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, and just try to give us an example of what the shaking consisted of.”
What happens next in Roberson’s case remains unclear. Under Texas law, Roberson cannot be executed until 90 days after the state announces a new execution date. This means the earliest Roberson can now be executed is January, after the Nov. 4 elections during which three of the five Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judges who voted last month to deny Roberson’s most recent petition for a new trial will be replaced.