[imagesource: John Grisham / Facebook]

Bestselling author John Grisham has joined a group of high-profile politicians, lawyers, scientists and doctors defending a Texas man who is about to be executed after being convicted of a crime that never happened.

Grisham, whose legal thrillers have been adapted into popular Hollywood films including The Firm and The Pelican Brief, spoke out on Robert Roberson, 57, who has spent more than 20 years on death row in Texas for fatally shaking his two-year-old daughter Nikki.

If Roberson’s planned execution by lethal injection proceeds on October 17th, he will be the first person put to death in the United States on the grounds of “shaken baby syndrome,” a medical theory from the 1970s that has been extensively disproven as pseudoscience.

Roberson’s lawyers filed a 62-page clemency petition with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles calling for a commutation of his death sentence. The petition is a last chance for the prisoner, who is now at the mercy of the courts or Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott.

Grisham told reporters on Tuesday “In most death conviction cases, you’ve got a murder and somebody did it, but in Robert’s case there was no crime and yet we’re about to kill somebody for it in Texas. It’s so infuriating.”

Roberson’s petition claims that this is a case, not of the wrong man having been condemned, but one in which the crime for which he was accused never even happened.

“No offense occurred … Mr Roberson is actually innocent of the offense for which he was convicted and sentenced to death based on pseudo-science that has since been discredited.”

Grisham said he was keen to get involved in the campaign to save Roberson’s life because “I just have a real anger at these cases. I can’t let them go, I think about them all the time. Especially a case like Roberts where we are a month away, the clock is ticking, and yet we have clear scientific proof that he didn’t kill Nikki.”

Grisham has a history of fighting for innocent men in his novels, but this is real life and the stakes are much higher.

 

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Grisham joined the board of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries – which have helped to exonerate at least 200 people from death row in the US over the past half-century – after writing his first non-fiction book, the Innocent Man, about Ron Williamson who was wrongly convicted of rape and murder and put on death row in Oklahoma until he was exonerated in 1999.

Grisham compared Roberson’s case to that of Cameron Todd Willingham, a man who allegedly killed his three young children and was put to death by Texas in 2004. Willingham was charged with arson but it was discovered that the forensic hypotheses supporting his conviction were ‘junk science’.

Grisham’s next book, Framed, which comes out two days before Roberson’s scheduled execution, is a non-fiction work that narrates 10 true stories of people who were wrongly found guilty.

According to the clemency petition, Roberson’s conviction was founded on several grave errors.

Without consulting Nikki’s real medical record, medical staff assumed that she had been severely shaken when she was brought to the hospital in a vegetative state in February 2002. They failed to notice crucial signs, such as the girl’s fever of 40.3C just before she passed out, her undiagnosed pneumonia, and the fact that she had been prescribed medications that are now known to be fatal for children.

In addition to this, Roberson’s petition notes that detectives and medical staff who came into contact with Roberson interpreted his non-expressive demeanour as the posture of a ‘callous killer’, whereas the convicted man was autistic, and his behaviour was characteristic of his condition.

Even Brian Wharton, the lead detective in the case, believes the entire conviction is a lie.

“There was no crime scene, no forensic evidence. It was just three words: shaken baby syndrome. Without them, he would be a free man today.”

Shaken baby syndrome, or SBS, is a child abuse theory that emerged in the early 1970s. It was hailed as an explanation for why some children presented with severe, and sometimes fatal, illness with signs of internal head trauma but little or no sign of external injury.