New Evidence in Robert Roberson Case Revealed in NBC Dateline Podcast

With one week left before Robert Roberson is to be executed by the state of Texas, his attorney, Gretchen Sween, informed the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Tuesday that new evidence strongly suggests the judge who presided over Roberson’s 2003 trial was biased against him. Sween argues that the evidence requires the state to retry her client.

“It is now indisputable that Robert’s case was infected by egregious judicial misconduct from the outset,” Sween told reporters. “It’s shocking that we are discovering the truth about this glaring, undisclosed evidence of bias only by chance, from a podcast, days before Robert is scheduled to be executed for a tragedy that has been mislabeled as a crime.”

Roberson was convicted in 2003 of murdering his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, on the basis of the controversial medical theory known as shaken baby syndrome. In 2002, he brought his unconscious daughter to the Palestine emergency room, where doctors restarted her heart and sent her to a hospital in Dallas. Roberson told the Palestine police that he had awoken to find Nikki unconscious. They took him into custody, suspicious that he had beaten her. Nikki was taken off life support in Dallas and died. Roberson was charged with murder. 

Sween has long argued that the Dallas doctors removed Nikki from life support without Roberson’s consent, which violated state law because he was her sole managing conservator. In August, she learned of a meeting between Republican state Rep. Lacey Hull, who supports a new trial for Roberson, and a representative of the hospital where Nikki died. In that meeting, the hospital representative told Hull that doctors did not take Nikki off life support until they received confirmation from an unidentified Anderson County official that her maternal grandparents – who are advocating for Roberson’s execution – had the authority to remove her from life support.  

According to a Notice of New Evidence filed by Sween with the TCCA, Nikki’s paternal grandfather, Larry Bowman, revealed on an NBC Dateline podcast released this week that the unidentified Anderson County official who allowed Nikki to be taken off life support was Judge Bascom Bentley – the man who later presided over Roberson’s trial.

“That the Anderson County judge who presided over Robert’s trial never disclosed that he is the one who authorized circumventing Robert’s parental rights and violating Texas law so that Nikki’s removal from life support could be hastened – and then her father charged with capital murder – is very disturbing,” Sween said. “Judges should not be in the business of presuming guilt, overriding the law, violating a man’s rights, and then concealing it all. This kind of conflict should have been disclosed and led to the judge’s recusal.”

Sween has been feverishly working to save Roberson for the last several months, just as she did in October of 2024, during a previous attempt by the state to execute him. On that occasion, Republicans and Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives subpoenaed Roberson to appear at the Capitol to discuss the case, derailing the execution. Sween has characterized the bipartisan subpoena as a miracle. By next week, we’ll know if this new revelation constitutes a second miracle.  

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