AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A Texas man scheduled to be put to death next week for murdering his 2-year-old daughter has been granted a stay of execution after his lawyers argued his conviction stemmed from “junk science” about shaken baby syndrome. 
 
 Death row inmate Robert Roberson is seen in an undated photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Texas Department of Criminal Justice/Handout via REUTERS 
 
 The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Thursday halted the planned June 21 execution of Robert Roberson and sent his case back to a trial court. It based its decision on a recent state law that permits legal challenges citing new scientific evidence potentially pointing to wrongful convictions. 
 
 Roberson, 49, was found guilty of killing his daughter in 2002. Prosecutors said he took her to the hospital after causing fatal head injuries or trauma in the toddler. 
 
 In a brief filed with the court this month, his lawyers said new scientific evidence showed that he should not have been convicted and the state relied on “false, misleading, and scientifically invalid testimony.” 
 
 Roberson has contended that the death of the girl, Nikki Curtis, may have been caused by a fall from her bed or a fever of 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit (40.3°C) that led to a visit to a doctor two days before her death. 
 
 Prosecutors presented experts at his original trial who said Nikki died of shaken baby syndrome and that Roberson intended to sexually abuse her. 
 
 The Texas attorney general’s office has said in court filings that Roberson was properly convicted and sentenced to death. 
 
 For decades, pathologists, pediatricians and courts recognized a distinct set of internal head injuries - brain swelling, bleeding on the surface of the brain and behind the eyes – as proof of death by deliberate shaking, even in the absence of other overt signs of violence. 
 
 But medical consensus has shifted in recent years and research now shows such injuries can be caused by accidental falls from a short height, or even medical conditions such as blood-clotting disorders and latent trauma from a difficult birth, which can manifest weeks later. 
 
 Lawyers for Roberson also pointed out that it is impossible to shake a baby to death without causing serious neck injuries, which his child did not suffer. 
 
 “Robert Roberson was wrongfully convicted of murdering his ... daughter based on junk science and highly inflammatory sexual-abuse allegations that were false,” his lawyers said in their court filing. ||||| This photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Robert Roberson III. Texas' highest criminal court has given a reprieve to Roberson, who was set for execution next week for the... (Associated Press) 
 
 This photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Robert Roberson III. Texas' highest criminal court has given a reprieve to Roberson, who was set for execution next week for the slaying of his 2-year-old daughter 14 years ago. (Texas Department of Criminal Justice via AP) (Associated Press) 
 
 This photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Robert Roberson III. Texas' highest criminal court has given a reprieve to Roberson, who was set for execution next week for the slaying of his 2-year-old daughter 14 years ago. (Texas Department of Criminal Justice via AP) (Associated Press) This photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Robert Roberson III. Texas' highest criminal court has given a reprieve to Roberson, who was set for execution next week for the... (Associated Press) 
 
 HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — Attorneys who contended "junk science" was used to send a father to death row for killing his 2-year-old daughter 14 years ago have won a reprieve blocking the Texas inmate's execution set for next week. 
 
 Robert Roberson III, 49, was set to die Tuesday for the February 2002 death of his daughter, Nikki Curtis, at his home in Palestine in East Texas. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sent his case back to his Anderson County trial court late Thursday to review claims he is innocent of capital murder. There is no timetable for the appeal to be resolved. One judge on the nine-member court, Lawrence Meyers, voted to refuse the reprieve and dismiss the appeal. 
 
 Lawyers argued Roberson's conviction was based on "junk science" and "false, misleading and scientifically invalid testimony" and that new scientific evidence establishes he would not have been convicted. 
 
 The child had serious head injuries, and Roberson contended she accidentally fell from a bed. Medical staff at a Palestine hospital called police because they considered the injuries suspicious. Physicians who examined her said bruises to her chin, cheek and jaw and a subdural hematoma — bleeding outside her brain but inside her skull — likely were intentional and no accident. 
 
 Nikki died the next day, Feb. 1, 2002, and a medical examiner ruled blunt force head injuries as the cause. 
 
 Defense attorney Benjamin Wolff told the appeals court that Nikki's death could be attributed to a number of things, such as undiagnosed meningitis, an accidental injury before Roberson began caring for her the day she died, a fall from the bed he didn't see or a fatal congenital condition. 
 
 The Anderson County District Attorney's office did not immediately respond to a message left Friday. 
 
 According to court records, she'd been living with Roberson and his girlfriend, Teddie Cox, for about three months after a court awarded him custody of the child. 
 
 Testimony from Cox, who was not the child's mother, showed he had no interest in caring for his daughter, but was her sole caretaker for the first time on Jan. 31, 2002, and was not pleased. 
 
 Prosecutors initially said Roberson sexually assaulted the 2-year-old, based on statements from a hospital nurse, but dropped that element of the capital murder charge late in the trial when evidence could not conclusively support it. 
 
 "But by then, the damage had been done," Wolff said in Roberson's appeal. "The state used this rank speculation to drive home its view that Robert was not just a poor, mentally impaired father struggling with sobriety, but a deviant — capable of raping and brutally shaking his own daughter to death." 
 
 Roberson was a parolee with previous convictions for burglary and theft and parole violations. 
 
 At least seven other Texas inmates have executions scheduled for the coming months, including one in July and four in August. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Michael Graczyk on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mikegraczyk ||||| Prosecutors build murder cases on disputed Shaken Baby Syndrome diagnosis 
 
 Six years ago, in a tidy home day care on the edge of a cornfield, with angel figurines in the flower beds and an American flag over the driveway, 9-month-old Trevor Ulrich stopped breathing. He had contusions on his scalp and bleeding on the surface of his swollen brain. 
 
 Within weeks, day-care owner Gail Dobson was charged with killing the baby in a fit of frustration at the business she had run for 29 years along a rural stretch of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The Sunday school teacher and grandmother of three was convicted of second-degree murder in 2010, eight months shy of her 54th birthday, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. 
 
 “To me, she is a monster,” Trevor’s mother told a local television reporter in 2013. “She is a cold-hearted killer.” 
 
 But what prosecutors called a clear-cut case of child abuse is now mired in doubt. Two doctors working on Dobson’s appeal last year argued that the scientific testimony used against her was fundamentally flawed. A judge overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial, finding that a jury hearing that argument could have had “a reasonable doubt” about her guilt. 
 
 Doctors for the prosecution said Trevor had been a victim of Shaken Baby Syndrome, a 40-year-old medical diagnosis long defined by three internal conditions: swelling of the brain, bleeding on the surface of the brain and bleeding in the back of the eyes. The diagnosis gave a generation of doctors a way to account for unexplained head injuries in babies and prosecutors a stronger case for criminal intent when police had no witnesses, no confessions and only circumstantial evidence. 
 
 It has also led to more than a decade of fierce debate: Testing has been unable to show whether violent shaking can produce the bleeding and swelling long attributed to the diagnosis, and doctors have found that accidents and diseases can trigger identical conditions in babies. 
 
 Challenges to the diagnosis have spilled into courts on two continents. In 2005, Britain’s Court of Appeal found that the head and eye injuries alone were not absolute proof of abuse and, in Sweden last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the scientific support for the diagnosis had “turned out to be uncertain.” 
 
 In the United States, 16 convictions have been overturned since 2001, including three last year. In Illinois, a federal judge who recently freed a mother of two after nearly a decade in prison called Shaken Baby Syndrome “more an article of faith than a proposition of science.” 
 
 Despite the uncertainty, prosecutors are still using the diagnosis to help prove criminal cases beyond a “reasonable doubt” against hundreds of parents and caregivers. 
 
 “You can’t necessarily prove [Shaken Baby Syndrome] one way or another — sort of like politics or religion,” said forensic pathologist Gregory G. Davis, the chief medical examiner in Birmingham, Ala., and the board chairman of the National Association of Medical Examiners. “Neither side can point to compelling evidence and say, ‘We’re right and the other side is wrong.’ So instead, it goes to trial.” 
 
 The Washington Post, in an investigation with journalists at Northwestern University’s Medill Justice Project, carried out the first systematic examination of dispositions in Shaken Baby cases since doctors started disputing the science behind the syndrome. 
 
 Reporters used court records and newspaper reports to track down murder or abuse cases involving shaking that have been filed or dismissed since 2001. The year-long study unearthed about 1,800 resolved cases nationwide, finding some of the heaviest concentrations in counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nebraska. 
 
 About 1,600 cases resulted in a conviction, a rate that is higher than that for other violent crimes. In hundreds of cases, there were reports of shaking along with more obvious forms of violence that left extensive bruises and broken bones, with prosecutors alleging that babies also had been slammed, thrown or beaten. 
 
 The study for the first time identified about 200 cases in 47 states that ended when charges were dropped or dismissed, defendants were found not guilty or convictions were overturned. 
 
 Among them: a 39-year-old software entrepreneur in California who mourned his infant son while locked in an isolation cell; a 13-year-old babysitter in Washington who was charged with second-degree murder; and a 46-year-old grandmother in Arizona who spent nearly 2½ years facing capital murder charges. 
 
 Kelly Kline, acquitted in 2012 of shaking a baby to death in her home day care in rural Ohio, met her 6-year-old daughter for a parents’ lunch at school the day her mug shot flashed on the local news. 
 
 “If I wasn’t married and didn’t have kids, I would have committed suicide because of the hell, the embarrassment,” said Kline, a mother of three. 
 
 Kelly Kline at home with her family April 20 in Shreve, Ohio. Kline was charged with killing a child by shaking. Kline was found not guilty. (Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post) 
 
 In four of the cases, doctors who had diagnosed shaking later revised their opinions, saying they were uncertain about the timing or cause of the injuries. One of the revisions helped free a Sacramento father after 3½ years in jail. 
 
 In four other cases, new medical examiners found that their predecessors had made mistakes by diagnosing shaking in babies who likely died from conditions that had nothing to do with violence. One doctor in Tennessee found a 10-week-old diagnosed with shaking appeared to have suffered from a series of strokes while he was in the womb. 
 
 Forensic pathologist George Nichols is among the doctors who once diagnosed Shaken Baby Syndrome and no longer believes in the science. 
 
 “Doctors, myself included, have accepted as true an unproven theory about a potential cause of brain injury in children,” said Nichols, who was the chief medical examiner of Kentucky for 20 years before retiring in 1997. “My greatest worry is that I have deprived someone of justice because I have been overtly biased or just mistaken.”
– A man on death row in Texas has been granted a last-minute reprieve after his lawyers successfully argued he was convicted on "junk science" regarding shaken baby syndrome, Reuters reports. Robert Roberson, who had been scheduled to be executed June 21, was convicted in 2002 of murdering his 2-year-old daughter. According to the AP, Roberson's girlfriend says he was angry when he became the sole caregiver of his daughter, Nikki. That same day, Roberson brought Nikki to the hospital with serious head injuries. Doctors thought they looked intentional and called police. Nikki died the following day. While Roberson maintains Nikki was hurt falling off her bed or from a fever, experts during his trial testified that she died of shaken baby syndrome and that Roberson planned to sexually abuse her. But new research shows that what used to be taken as signs of shaken baby syndrome—brain swelling and bleeding behind the eyes and on the brain’s surface—can also be caused by short falls or undiagnosed medical conditions. Roberson's lawyers successfully convinced eight of the nine members on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that Roberson had been convicted on "false, misleading, and scientifically invalid testimony." Nikki never showed any outward signs, such as an injured neck, of shaken baby syndrome. Roberson's case will now go back to trial. (This boy died 12 years after being shaken as a baby.)