On January 31, 2002, Robert Roberson carried his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, into the emergency room in Palestine, Texas. She was limp and blue, and she had been sick all week. He said she had fallen out of bed in the night. The nurses thought he seemed too calm, and the detective said his story didn’t match the evidence. Nikki died the next day.

Doctors called it shaken baby syndrome. Within a year a jury had convicted Roberson of capital murder, and he was sentenced to death.

Twenty years later the case looks different. New experts point to pneumonia, the medicine she was given, and a fall. The State’s experts still stand by abuse. Roberson was later diagnosed with autism, and the detective who arrested him now says he didn’t see Robert for who he was. In October 2024, days before his execution date, a Texas House committee stepped in. A year later the state’s highest criminal court stopped the execution and sent the case back to East Texas.

This episode walks through what the jury heard, what has changed since, and why some of the people who were most sure in 2002 aren’t anymore. As of October 2026, Robert Roberson is still waiting.

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