Retired detective: We got it wrong in Robert Roberson's death penalty case

I do. But I also wonder about the role of the "highest court in the land", when other courts, state or federal, "decline" to hear appeals with factual evidence of innocence.

I don't think "Too bad, that's the law, just lobby to have it changed" is an acceptable response to someone facing capital punishment.

They are in part about federalism and in part about the absence of a right to have a verdict reviewed if it was arrived at properly, irrespective of new evidence discovered later.

Were such a right to exist under the Constitutiom, federalism would no longer require the federal courts to stay out of state cases involving such claims, since there would br a justiciable question of federal law.

The executive system can grant clemency, etc.

My point is that there's more "bang for the buck" wrt saving innocents from being dying due to wrongful "not death penalty" convictions, even if you discount "dying in the infirmary" quite a bit relative to "dying in the chair."

I'm not saying that you shouldn't care about the death penalty.

My comment is addressed to people who care about dying due to wrongful conviction.

You do not make any sense. It is all backwards.

>"(Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia)" Russia has a moratorium since the end of 80s / beginning of 90s and does not execute people.

Only politicians and judges should face that possibility, only because they wield the flaming sword of the state!

Tangentially, in some Scandinavian (I believe?) countries, escaping from prison is not a punishable offense. To be clear, you will be looked for, and taken back to prison when found, but their legal system has ruled that the craving for freedom is a natural human urge, and that it's punishing human behavior to punish escapees for escaping.

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

Of course if a person remorselessly commits a capital crime it changes a lot of things. But one big problem is that justice system can't reliably always determine who committed the crime (or was it committed at all).

Also, another case in which the death penalty could be warranted:

The person has confessed to the crime, does not recant their confession, and accepts (or even desires) the death penalty in lieu of lifetime imprisonment. (Yes, there are cases like this.)

Of course, this reads a bit more like suicide, and may not be necessary if we had appropriate "right-to-die" provisions in general (such that they also applied to prisoners). Maybe we should just give all such prisoners access to a seppuku knife once a year.

> Are you telling me that shaking babies doesn't kill them?

It sure can, and a number of babies diagnosed with SBS have been abused or killed.

However, the way shaking is typically inferred from a small set of supposedly characteristic medical findings (radiological and pathological evidence of blood in the layers surrounding the brain and at the back of the eyes) has a weak scientific evidence based — determining abuse requires a far more sophisticated approach. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402

Many cops tend to rely on getting a “feel” for the suspect. High-functioning autistic folks often have “resting bitch face.” They don’t come across as “likable,” and people can “get their back up” over it.

I’m a bit “on the spectrum,” and, as anyone in my shoes can tell you, we’re bully magnets. My grade school days were absolute hell. I got the shit kicked out of me, on a regular basis, for no other reason, than “I don’t like the way you’re looking at me!”. I spent many years, training my “resting face” to be fairly open and friendly. People seem to think I look like an idiot, but that’s OK, because they also tend to underestimate me. At least, they don’t think I’m being hostile.

> Robert Roberson’s case is riddled with unscientific evidence, inaccurate and misleading medical testimony, and prejudicial treatment. In 2002, Mr. Roberson’s two-year old, chronically ill daughter, Nikki, was sick with a high fever and suffered a short fall from bed. Hospital staff did not know Mr.

> Roberson had autism and judged his response to his daughter’s grave condition as lacking emotion. Mr. Roberson was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to death under the now-discredited “shaken baby syndrome” (SBS) hypothesis.

Anyways edited and reworded it just to be crystal clear here and keep closer to how article(s) put it in context of a criminal investigation:

> highly controversial shaken baby syndrome theory (not straightforward to prove; hence erronous)

Precisely. It is a back justification for a religious notion that universal/cosmic justice is actually a thing and not a product of human psychology in groups. Karma is one example of this pernicious religious thinking. Supreme Court can't come out and say that though or else the magick trick of governance and statehood falls apart. It relies on both your consent and your belief in its inevitability to maintain its existence and influence.

Allowing for banishment will teach the other animals on the farm that the farmer is not god. Separation of church and state is impossible as statism is itself a religion with a god (the state, maybe in proxy for the ephemeral We The People); all the separation accomplished was plastering a neutral color wallpaper on the old system.

[0] https://www.justice.gouv.fr/justice-france/justice-penale/pr....

A lot of this stems from the swathe of exonerations that happened once DNA was introduced and freed a large number of provably innocent people previously found guilty.

Doesn’t sound like a family that thought he was a child-beating monster.

She had no neck trauma when she died. CT scans showed a single blunt impact to the back right of her head, consistent with a fall and strange for a beating.

More than all of that, the medical evidence doesn’t even look like she died from the blunt force trauma.

She showed up to the ER blue lips, a telltale sign of hypoxia. She had severe undiagnosed viral pneumonia, despite having been to the doctor because we didn’t look at the strain until COVID. Pneumonia impacts breathing function. On top of that, she was prescribed phenergan, an opioid that now carries a warning not to prescribe it to children _because it can make them stop breathing_. On top of that, the day before she died she was prescribed codeine, which now also carries a warning label not to prescribe it to respiratory-depressed children _because it can make them stop breathing_.

Lab results show what we now know to be a fatal dose of Phenergan.

She died, sadly, as a result of multiple respiratory depressing factors due to a societal failure to ensure medications were safe for children in her situation. The blunt trauma isn’t even relevant; the phenergan and pneumonia would have killed her anyways.

This is just the usual villification of an easy target: he’s poor and autistic, he was never going to look good to a jury. They probably could have gotten a conviction for murdering Amelia Earhart if they’d tried.

Ah, by my nanny. I didn't understand this sentence at first.

Note that this is the problem that was solved by reference to a "jury of your peers". Your peers are familiar with you in specific and know how you behave. But the evolution of the US legal system has actually banned being tried by a jury of your peers; you're required to be judged by strangers who have never heard of you.

> Let's start with the fact that there was no other known suspect.

That's not for a jury to decide. There was no other suspect presented.

> Yet there was no sign of a forced break-in and no indication of robbery or theft.

Is that actually mentioned in the movie? I'm rereading the screenplay [0], and the only mention of any motive is the fight between the dad and the kid, which seems to be undisputed. The prosecution isn't going to tell us about all the other pieces of evidence that don't fit the case they're trying to present. The defense could have done so, but let's be honest, it was probably some overworked public defender because a 16-year-old is probably not the sort who can afford a first-rate criminal defense lawyer.

The claim that you can take these pieces of circumstantial evidence and do some math on them to arrive at some probability above 90% is... not really how arguments are constructed. Juror #8 had serious concerns with each of the core pieces of testimony, which could have been enough to consider each of the witnesses untrustworthy. If the jury is not willing to accept any of the evidence, then there's simply no case.

> This "demonstration" hardly diminishes the strong inference of guilt raised by the fact that the defendant could remember nothing at all about the movie he claimed to have just seen. And nobody saw him at the theater. His alibi, therefore, is highly suspect.

Sure, his alibi (along with the rest of the cited testimony from the defendant) is not very believable. But the absence of an alibi does not automatically prove guilt.

[0] e.g. https://thescriptlab.com/wp-content/uploads/scripts/12AngryM...

.. you mean.. in your opinion? I don't remember the narrator stating the kid was guilty. Heck, even a flashback about the kid murdering his father wouldn't make it canon, since it can have inworld refutation, such as robots, aliens, shapeshifters, FBI hypnosis program or such.

> The only other possible explanation is that he had a brother

No, there are several possible different explanations, with varying levels of likeliness. The murderer had an identical knife, the murderer stole or picked up the kids knife, the murderer wanted to frame the kid specifically, the murderer wanted to kill someone else and frame someone (for example, one of the eye witnesses, or both of them were the murderer), and the kid and his father were a good candidate, and so on.