Last month, an appeals court blocked the state of Texas from executing Robert Roberson for the murder of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki. The decision came down on October 9, a week before his scheduled execution.

Roberson would have been the first person in the history of the United States to be put to death based on the dubious shaken baby syndrome (SBS) hypothesis, which one judge likened to “junk science.”

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sent Roberson’s case back to the trial court to determine if he is entitled to the same relief as Andrew Roark, a Texas man who was exonerated last year in a case nearly identical to Roberson’s, down to the expert who testified against him.

“Deciding that issue will, of necessity, require considering the mountain of medical records, scientific studies, expert opinions, and other evidence that proves his very ill little girl died from natural and accidental causes, not shaking or other abuse,” Roberson’s attorney, Gretchen Sween, said in a statement.

As the case against Roberson has unraveled, he’s gained legions of supporters, including Roark and fellow exonerees, retired federal judges, author John Grisham, scientists, physicians, and Texas lawmakers.

A bipartisan group of state legislators has rallied to stop Roberson’s execution. Last year, they held a hearing on his case and decried the injustice of his conviction. In an unprecedented move, the day before his last execution date, they subpoenaed Roberson to testify, effectively blocking his execution from occurring.

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Of all his supporters, potentially one of the most surprising and important is Brian Wharton, the lead detective on Roberson’s case over 20 years ago.

“I wasn’t comfortable with his conviction from very early on,” Wharton, now a pastor, told The Nation. “I earnestly believed that just a good appeal would give him some form of relief.”

But, he continued, “we have come very close to killing him twice.”

“I’m not naïve anymore,” he said. “I struggle to have faith in that system anymore.”

From here, Roberson’s route to exoneration remains a circuitous one. In Texas, the trial court cannot order a new trial; it can only make a recommendation for or against one. After the trial court makes its recommendation, the case then goes back to the Court of Criminal Appeals, which can order a new trial, no matter the lower court’s recommendation. Roberson’s request for an evidentiary hearing is currently pending before the trial court.

“Working this thing through the system to try to someday get an answer, it’s just maddening,” Wharton said. “But that’s the machine we have built, and we just got to deal with it.”

Nikki Curtis had a brief and tumultuous life. Shortly after her birth, child protective services took Nikki from her biological mother, who had a history of child neglect, and custody was awarded to her maternal grandparents, according to Roberson’s petition, which provides a detailed account of her medical history.

Nikki suffered from chronic, antibiotic-resistant infections. She was diagnosed with her first ear infection at just eight days old. At the time of her death, she had been to the doctor dozens of times.

Roberson’s petition says that while still in the custody of her grandparents, Nikki began having breathing apnea episodes, and that the cause was never determined. On one occasion, she collapsed and turned blue, and her grandmother resuscitated her.

In November of 2001, when she was just over 2 years old, Nikki’s grandparents voluntarily relinquished their custody rights to Roberson, after a paternity test, which he had voluntarily taken, established that he was Nikki’s father. At the time, Roberson, who had left school after his freshman year in high school, was delivering newspapers to support his family.

On January 28, 2002, Roberson brought Nikki to the emergency room in Palestine, Texas, where she was diagnosed with a viral infection. For the past week, Nikki had diarrhea, had been vomiting, and had difficulty breathing, according to legal filings.

A doctor prescribed the antihistamine promethazine. The FDA has since placed a “black box” warning on Phenergan (the brand name for promethazine), which states it should not be used in children under 2 “because of the potential for fatal respiratory depression.” At the time it was prescribed to Nikki, she was about 27 months old.

The next day, Nikki had a temperature of 103.1°F. Roberson brought her to the pediatrician’s office, where her temperature was recorded at 104.5°F. The doctor prescribed her promethazine with codeine. Nikki went home with her grandparents so Roberson could care for his girlfriend, who was recovering from a hysterectomy.

The following night, January 30, 2002, Roberson brought Nikki home. According to Roberson, they watched a movie together and fell asleep.

“I got her ready for bed and put in a movie for her to fall asleep to,” Roberson wrote in a handwritten statement last year. “We both fell asleep while the movie was playing.”

At about five the next morning, Roberson wrote that he woke up because he heard a “strange cry.” He found Nikki on the floor, by the foot of the bed. He saw a speck of blood on her lip and wiped it off with a “wash rag.”

“I kept her up talking for a while,” he wrote. “We both fell back asleep.”

When he woke up a few hours later, Nikki was not breathing, and her lips were blue. He took her to the same hospital they had visited just a couple of days earlier.

This account of Roberson’s has remained consistent ever since.

Nikki was transferred to Dallas Children’s Hospital. There, the hospital’s child abuse pediatrician, Dr. Janet Squires, concluded that Nikki was the victim of “shaken impact syndrome”—also known as shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma—even though Nikki had no injuries to her neck, spine, or spinal cord.

Squires is the same expert who testified against Roark, the Texas man who was exonerated last year.

Although Nikki had been seriously ill, her grandparents told Squires that she was “totally well” before her collapse and made no mention of her visit to the emergency room or pediatrician, or the medications she had been prescribed, according to Roberson’s petition to the court.

Wharton says that, during his investigation, he was unaware of Nikki’s extensive medical history or that she had been sick the week before her death.

“We completely—we being the police, the hospitals, the doctors, and the medical examiners—completely missed the medical history,” Wharton told The Nation. “Nobody was looking backwards.”

At the time of Roberson’s conviction, the medical community had coalesced around an SBS hypothesis that was nearly impossible to challenge in court. At the time, they believed that, based on a so-called triad of symptoms—bleeding around the brain; brain swelling; and bleeding in the eyes—experts could determine a child was shaken so violently that they were immediately incapacitated. In other words, the last person with the child must be the perpetrator.

Now, experts understand that the “triad” can be indicative of a number of conditions that have nothing to do with abuse, such as a stroke, sickle cell disease, or a short-distance fall.

“Each of the shaken baby premises considered medical orthodoxy in 2002-2003, when Mr. Roberson was arrested and tried, has since been entirely undermined by evidence-based science,” a group of 10 pathologists wrote in a statement on Roberson’s case. “None of the SBS principles have ever been validated and many have since been debunked by evidence-based medicine and biomechanical engineering studies.”

Thirty-eight people have been exonerated in SBS cases, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Most of those exonerations occurred after Roberson’s conviction in 2003.

“For years and years, pediatricians and pathologists said things like, ‘This can only be from shaking. This can only be from child abuse,’” Kate Judson, executive director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences (CIFS), told The Nation. “Now we know that that isn’t the case.”

CIFS submitted an amicus brief in support of Roberson to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

Judson said the SBS hypothesis lacks “foundational validity.”

“We don’t have solid proof that a physician can look at a child who has this internal bleeding without external injury, and definitively determine that it occurred by shaking or abuse,” she said.

Roberson’s legal team has consulted with a number of specialists to understand how Nikki died. Based on a review of her medical records and autopsy file, they have “provided a comprehensive explanation for Nikki’s death,” Roberson’s petition says.

The experts discovered that at the time of her death Nikki had a number of undiagnosed ailments—a rare blood-clotting disorder called disseminated intravascular coagulation, and a double infection of pneumonia, both bacterial and viral, which had progressed to sepsis. Her condition was likely exacerbated by the high levels of promethazine, a respiratory suppressant, in her system.

Michael Laposata, a world-renowned expert in blood and clotting disorders, wrote in his report that at the time of her death and Roberson’s trial, SBS “was presumed whenever a child, like Nikki, had intracranial bleeding, brain swelling, and retinal hemorrhages.”

However, he continued, “over the past two decades, as evidence-based science has been applied to the AHT [abusive head trauma] hypothesis, that presumption has been repudiated.”

At Roberson’s trial, both the prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed Roberson had shaken Nikki.

“Are we talking about just a little shaking?” the prosecutor asked Squires, the child abuse pediatrician who had diagnosed Nikki with shaken impact syndrome.

“No. It’s a very violent, forceful act,” she replied. “It is not something that you see in normal children who are cared for by reasonable adults.”

After Nikki was shaken, Squires testified, she would have been unable to walk or talk.

Even though Roberson says he told his attorney he was innocent, he argued that Roberson had shaken Nikki, but not intended to kill her.

“[T]his was not an act of murder,” his trial attorney told the jury during closing arguments. “It’s the act of an angry, out-of-control parent.”

Roberson did not testify.

“Before, during, and after my trial, I kept asking for someone to investigate my innocence, but no one would do this,” Roberson said in a statement to his current legal team.

“Several times my lawyers told me that the State would give me a plea deal if I would plead guilty,” he said. “I did not want to do that because I did not do anything to hurt Nikki.”

The prosecutors portrayed Roberson as a callous father who didn’t care if his daughter lived or died. To support their theory, they solicited testimony about what they perceived as his odd behavior while Nikki was hospitalized.

Wharton told the jury that at the hospital, Roberson was “unemotional and detached.” He accompanied Roberson from the hospital to his home. When they arrived, he testified, Roberson made himself a sandwich.

“He doesn’t feel anything for his own daughter,” Wharton recalled thinking at the time. “She’s on her way to be life flighted out of here, and he’s hungry. It was a very odd moment. It didn’t help him in our eyes, certainly.”

During closing arguments, the prosecutor told jurors: “Mr. Roberson’s daughter is intubated, virtually dead—and Mr. Roberson fixes up a little sandwich.”

Many years after his conviction, in 2018, Roberson was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The Autism Society of America and the Autism Society of Texas say prosecutors criminalized Roberson’s disability.

“A lack of awareness and understanding about this developmental disability seems to have been unwittingly held against him and greatly contributed to his wrongful conviction and death sentence,” they wrote in an open letter in support of Roberson. “His mannerisms, misinterpreted as cold and unemotional, led to the dismissal of his account of Nikki’s fall.”

Wharton says he now views Roberson’s behaviors at that time through a different lens.

“Now when I sit down with him, I hear him, I can see him,” Wharton told The Nation. “He was a suspect. That’s the way I saw him, that’s the way I understood him, and that’s the way I listened to him.”

Wharton continued, “But now he is Robert. Robert with a ninth-grade education, Robert with autism, and he is a kind and generous and forgiving man who is still telling the same story [as he did in 2002].”

Wharton hopes that after all these years, the courts will finally listen to Roberson too.

“As good as this feels and as hopeful as we are, I’m still a little frightened that the system will, once again, find a way to protect itself rather than listening to Robert,” he said of the appeals court’s decision.

But, he continued, “this is the best news we’ve had in a very long time.”