Long after he retired from solving murders in rural East Texas, Brian Wharton looked back on one of his biggest cases with unease. A father named Robert Roberson had shown up at an emergency room with his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis. She was unconscious and turning blue. The father speculated that she’d fallen out of bed, but a pediatrician concluded that she had been shaken “very forcefully.” As a detective with the Palestine Police Department, Wharton deduced the father was to blame and testified at the 2003 trial, where Roberson was sentenced to death. But Wharton never could make sense of the man’s demeanor throughout these events. “He’s not getting mad, he’s not getting sad, he’s just not right,” Wharton recalled.Twenty years later, a defense…The post The Science Used to Send Him to Death Row Has Changed. The Courts Haven’t Yet Caught Up. appeared first on Texas Monthly.
