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Dr. John Ross, the pediatrician who examined Nikki the day she died, testified that she had bruising on her chin, as well as along her left cheek and jaw. Dr. R

Dr. John Ross, the pediatrician who examined Nikki the day she died, testified that she had bruising on her chin, as well as along her left cheek and jaw. Dr. Ross said she also had a large subdural hematoma, which he described as “bleeding outside the brain, but 3 inside the skull.” He said there was edema on the brain tissue, and that her brain had actually shifted from the right side to the left. He said that, in his opinion, Nikki Courtney said that she once witnessed [Roberson] shake Nikki by the arms in an attempt to make her stop crying. Rachel Cox then testified that [Roberson] had a “bad temper,” and that she had witnessed him shake and spank Nikki when she was crying. Rachel said she had seen this happen about ten times. She also recalled a time that [Roberson] threatened to kill Nikki. This case was reviewed under Texas' Junk Science law. It's a more complicated case than a cheap conviction on bad science. You can read the prosecution's brief. There is ample evidence of terrible behavior. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-7546/272085/20230714145417415_Roberson%20BIO%20FINAL%20Tables%20SIGNED.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-7546/272085/202...

DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
> There is ample evidence of terrible behavior. (IANAL, etc.) I assume you're referring to the claims made by the prosecution listed in the Introduction of the document? AFAIK, that's not "evidence" of abuse, but what the prosecution is alleging. Big difference. ...but even if that were the case, being a shitty parent - even to the point of physical abuse, doesn't justify the end result here given that the evidence cited in TFA makes a solid argument that the conviction is unsound. Ever seen "12 Angry Men"? If not, you should. ----- (Also, as someone on the spectrum with low-affect, even before reading about this case a few years ago, I was (and still am) terrified of being falsely convicted of something solely on my mannerisms - so I suppose I'm biased towards the defendent here)
- jimbob45 2y ago
  Ever seen "12 Angry Men"? If not, you should. The kid was guilty in that movie though. The only other possible explanation is that he had a brother that no one ever mentions or interrogates with video game-like levels of precognition to know perfectly how to frame his brother. https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3597&context=cklawreview https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
  - bmacho 2y ago
    > The kid was guilty in that movie though. .. you mean.. in your opinion? I don't remember the narrator stating the kid was guilty. Heck, even a flashback about the kid murdering his father wouldn't make it canon, since it can have inworld refutation, such as robots, aliens, shapeshifters, FBI hypnosis program or such. > The only other possible explanation is that he had a brother No, there are several possible different explanations, with varying levels of likeliness. The murderer had an identical knife, the murderer stole or picked up the kids knife, the murderer wanted to frame the kid specifically, the murderer wanted to kill someone else and frame someone (for example, one of the eye witnesses, or both of them were the murderer), and the kid and his father were a good candidate, and so on.
  - vitus 2y ago
    I disagree with that argument for many reasons. > Let's start with the fact that there was no other known suspect. That's not for a jury to decide. There was no other suspect presented. > Yet there was no sign of a forced break-in and no indication of robbery or theft. Is that actually mentioned in the movie? I'm rereading the screenplay [0], and the only mention of any motive is the fight between the dad and the kid, which seems to be undisputed. The prosecution isn't going to tell us about all the other pieces of evidence that don't fit the case they're trying to present. The defense could have done so, but let's be honest, it was probably some overworked public defender because a 16-year-old is probably not the sort who can afford a first-rate criminal defense lawyer. The claim that you can take these pieces of circumstantial evidence and do some math on them to arrive at some probability above 90% is... not really how arguments are constructed. Juror #8 had serious concerns with each of the core pieces of testimony, which could have been enough to consider each of the witnesses untrustworthy. If the jury is not willing to accept any of the evidence, then there's simply no case. > This "demonstration" hardly diminishes the strong inference of guilt raised by the fact that the defendant could remember nothing at all about the movie he claimed to have just seen. And nobody saw him at the theater. His alibi, therefore, is highly suspect. Sure, his alibi (along with the rest of the cited testimony from the defendant) is not very believable. But the absence of an alibi does not automatically prove guilt. [0] e.g. https://thescriptlab.com/wp-content/uploads/scripts/12AngryMen.pdf https://thescriptlab.com/wp-content/uploads/scripts/12AngryM...
- mordechai9000 2y ago
  I often fail to emote properly, for whatever reason, and more than one person has told me I'm obviously lying (usually about something trivial) because of it. I can't watch the show Unbelievable - it makes me too upset.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Trial lawyers will expound at length about how juries' perception of what witness behavior means is completely unrelated to reality. Note that this is the problem that was solved by reference to a "jury of your peers". Your peers are familiar with you in specific and know how you behave. But the evolution of the US legal system has actually banned being tried by a jury of your peers; you're required to be judged by strangers who have never heard of you.
- rossant 2y ago
  Exactly. I can relate. I am like you, and I was once suspected of shaking my nanny (the nanny would later be prosecuted before being cleared after 4 years). After the interview with social services, where they said with a smile "everything would be okay", they wrote I had a one stringed voice, showed little emotion and didn't cry while talking. They wrote it was suspicious of abuse and used that to recommend removing my 5 month old baby for a couple of years. The judge followed. That's the most devastating thing I ever had to endure. I was lucky enough that the lawyer was so pissed off by this that he fought like hell to bring us our baby back in less than a month. But that specific episode made me swear on my child that I would spend the rest of my life undoing this wrong somehow. I'm still here 8 years later.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    > I was once suspected of shaking my nanny Ah, by my nanny. I didn't understand this sentence at first.
    - rossant 2y ago
      Woops sorry. No, "my baby"!
      - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
        Hey, I think you had an article where you described your ordeal, no?
        rossant 2y ago
        Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
        YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
        Thanks. I was missing that from my bookmarks on SBS. Speaking of my SBS bookmarks, this is one of the latest: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/24/durham-woman-caned-son-3-murder-jailed-life-christina-robinson-dwelaniyah https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/24/durh... Christina Robinson (coincidence!) was found guilty of shaking her son to death and jailed for life. She admitted meting out corporal punishment, including caning and other instances of child abuse. It seems that after reading about a number of SBS cases my innate reflex of assuming that historic child abuse is evidence of murder has completely dissolved and I must look even at cases like this one with skepticism. What do you think? Edit: to be perfectly clear: I grew up with constant corporeal punishment by parents and teachers and I consider the practice abhorrent. But the same people who beat me up for misbehaving, horribly misguided though they were in thinking that's a way to raise a child, were not murderers and would never have gone as far as to cause life-threatening injury. I think this experience also colours my perception of cases like Christina Robinson. There's a sliding slope reasoning in many of those accusations that is very dangerous.
defrost 2y ago
> There is ample evidence of terrible behavior. What about actual hard evidence that Robertson definitely delibrately killed Nikki? Or is "looks like it" good enough for a death penalty in the US? It's nortoriously hard to undead people, eg: had Kathleen Folbigg lived in Texas it seems likely she'd be dead by now. Kathleen Folbigg, who on only circumstantial evidence was famously convicted of killing her four young children and jailed 2 decades ago, had just been pardoned by New South Wales and set free. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-geneticist-led-effort-free-mother-convicted-killing-her-kids https://www.science.org/content/article/how-geneticist-led-e... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Folbigg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Folbigg
banana_feather 2y ago
This misses the point. What you wrote is essentially "witness testifies defendant once shook child in their presence, child died". The magic third ingredient is that the state was allowed to bring in an expert witness to tell the jury that there's a causal link between shaking of the kind observed by the fact witness and the infliction of fatal injuries like those seen in the child. If it turns out no such link actually exists, you sort of have a problem, because the jury heard it either way. Also fwiw, that brief is still an adversarial motion, you cannot expect to get a balanced recounting of the facts by reading the state's motion in opposition.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >The magic third ingredient is that the state was allowed to bring in an expert witness to tell the jury that there's a causal link between shaking of the kind observed by the fact witness and the infliction of fatal injuries like those seen in the child. If it turns out no such link actually exists, you sort of have a problem That medical description of physical symptoms sounds fine as a "magic third ingredient" between "shaking of the kind observed" and the kid dying. Except if someone who treats a baby like that (as described by the witness) be beyond beating it, or if "bruising on her chin, as well as along her left cheek and jaw, and large subdural hematomas" develop spontaneously...
  - marmadukester39 2y ago
    Except if she had a clotting disorder as indicated that might make her bruise and get edemas with much less trauma and say she fell on her face/chin, all of those could happen comparatively easily. I don’t know what happened here and thats the point.
  - everforward 2y ago
    You mean the ex who was in a bitter custody battle at the time of the death, whose own sister testified against her? The same one whose parents called him to pick up the child the night before she died? Doesn’t sound like a family that thought he was a child-beating monster. She had no neck trauma when she died. CT scans showed a single blunt impact to the back right of her head, consistent with a fall and strange for a beating. More than all of that, the medical evidence doesn’t even look like she died from the blunt force trauma. She showed up to the ER blue lips, a telltale sign of hypoxia. She had severe undiagnosed viral pneumonia, despite having been to the doctor because we didn’t look at the strain until COVID. Pneumonia impacts breathing function. On top of that, she was prescribed phenergan, an opioid that now carries a warning not to prescribe it to children _because it can make them stop breathing_. On top of that, the day before she died she was prescribed codeine, which now also carries a warning label not to prescribe it to respiratory-depressed children _because it can make them stop breathing_. Lab results show what we now know to be a fatal dose of Phenergan. She died, sadly, as a result of multiple respiratory depressing factors due to a societal failure to ensure medications were safe for children in her situation. The blunt trauma isn’t even relevant; the phenergan and pneumonia would have killed her anyways. This is just the usual villification of an easy target: he’s poor and autistic, he was never going to look good to a jury. They probably could have gotten a conviction for murdering Amelia Earhart if they’d tried.
rossant 2y ago
For fairness you should also point to the defense's petition. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-7546/266633/20230511074854156_Roberson%20Cert%20Petition%20Final%20w%20Tables.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-7546/266633/202... It states, for example: > The Dallas hospital records indicate that Nikki also had a clotting disorder of unclear origin, which made her susceptible to bruising and likely increased the bleeding inside her skull.
lollersk8z 2y ago
Did you check or are you just taking the systems documentation of a known failure as concrete proof? Words really make people believe anything. Asimov covered this in Foundation; if you’re not measuring yourself you’re just a parrot of propaganda.
thebeardisred 2y ago
"Ample evidence" isn't the legal burden. It's a lack of reasonable doubt.
Aloisius 2y ago
> Courtney said that she once An 11 year old child. > Rachel Cox then testified A 10 year old child.

DaiPlusPlus 2y ago

> There is ample evidence of terrible behavior. (IANAL, etc.) I assume you're referring to the claims made by the prosecution listed in the Introduction of the document? AFAIK, that's not "evidence" of abuse, but what the prosecution is alleging. Big difference. ...but even if that were the case, being a shitty parent - even to the point of physical abuse, doesn't justify the end result here given that the evidence cited in TFA makes a solid argument that the conviction is unsound. Ever seen "12 Angry Men"? If not, you should. ----- (Also, as someone on the spectrum with low-affect, even before reading about this case a few years ago, I was (and still am) terrified of being falsely convicted of something solely on my mannerisms - so I suppose I'm biased towards the defendent here)

jimbob45 2y ago
Ever seen "12 Angry Men"? If not, you should. The kid was guilty in that movie though. The only other possible explanation is that he had a brother that no one ever mentions or interrogates with video game-like levels of precognition to know perfectly how to frame his brother. https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3597&context=cklawreview https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
- bmacho 2y ago
  > The kid was guilty in that movie though. .. you mean.. in your opinion? I don't remember the narrator stating the kid was guilty. Heck, even a flashback about the kid murdering his father wouldn't make it canon, since it can have inworld refutation, such as robots, aliens, shapeshifters, FBI hypnosis program or such. > The only other possible explanation is that he had a brother No, there are several possible different explanations, with varying levels of likeliness. The murderer had an identical knife, the murderer stole or picked up the kids knife, the murderer wanted to frame the kid specifically, the murderer wanted to kill someone else and frame someone (for example, one of the eye witnesses, or both of them were the murderer), and the kid and his father were a good candidate, and so on.
- vitus 2y ago
  I disagree with that argument for many reasons. > Let's start with the fact that there was no other known suspect. That's not for a jury to decide. There was no other suspect presented. > Yet there was no sign of a forced break-in and no indication of robbery or theft. Is that actually mentioned in the movie? I'm rereading the screenplay [0], and the only mention of any motive is the fight between the dad and the kid, which seems to be undisputed. The prosecution isn't going to tell us about all the other pieces of evidence that don't fit the case they're trying to present. The defense could have done so, but let's be honest, it was probably some overworked public defender because a 16-year-old is probably not the sort who can afford a first-rate criminal defense lawyer. The claim that you can take these pieces of circumstantial evidence and do some math on them to arrive at some probability above 90% is... not really how arguments are constructed. Juror #8 had serious concerns with each of the core pieces of testimony, which could have been enough to consider each of the witnesses untrustworthy. If the jury is not willing to accept any of the evidence, then there's simply no case. > This "demonstration" hardly diminishes the strong inference of guilt raised by the fact that the defendant could remember nothing at all about the movie he claimed to have just seen. And nobody saw him at the theater. His alibi, therefore, is highly suspect. Sure, his alibi (along with the rest of the cited testimony from the defendant) is not very believable. But the absence of an alibi does not automatically prove guilt. [0] e.g. https://thescriptlab.com/wp-content/uploads/scripts/12AngryMen.pdf https://thescriptlab.com/wp-content/uploads/scripts/12AngryM...
mordechai9000 2y ago
I often fail to emote properly, for whatever reason, and more than one person has told me I'm obviously lying (usually about something trivial) because of it. I can't watch the show Unbelievable - it makes me too upset.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Trial lawyers will expound at length about how juries' perception of what witness behavior means is completely unrelated to reality. Note that this is the problem that was solved by reference to a "jury of your peers". Your peers are familiar with you in specific and know how you behave. But the evolution of the US legal system has actually banned being tried by a jury of your peers; you're required to be judged by strangers who have never heard of you.
rossant 2y ago
Exactly. I can relate. I am like you, and I was once suspected of shaking my nanny (the nanny would later be prosecuted before being cleared after 4 years). After the interview with social services, where they said with a smile "everything would be okay", they wrote I had a one stringed voice, showed little emotion and didn't cry while talking. They wrote it was suspicious of abuse and used that to recommend removing my 5 month old baby for a couple of years. The judge followed. That's the most devastating thing I ever had to endure. I was lucky enough that the lawyer was so pissed off by this that he fought like hell to bring us our baby back in less than a month. But that specific episode made me swear on my child that I would spend the rest of my life undoing this wrong somehow. I'm still here 8 years later.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  > I was once suspected of shaking my nanny Ah, by my nanny. I didn't understand this sentence at first.
  - rossant 2y ago
    Woops sorry. No, "my baby"!
    - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
      Hey, I think you had an article where you described your ordeal, no?
      - rossant 2y ago
        Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
        YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
        Thanks. I was missing that from my bookmarks on SBS. Speaking of my SBS bookmarks, this is one of the latest: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/24/durham-woman-caned-son-3-murder-jailed-life-christina-robinson-dwelaniyah https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/24/durh... Christina Robinson (coincidence!) was found guilty of shaking her son to death and jailed for life. She admitted meting out corporal punishment, including caning and other instances of child abuse. It seems that after reading about a number of SBS cases my innate reflex of assuming that historic child abuse is evidence of murder has completely dissolved and I must look even at cases like this one with skepticism. What do you think? Edit: to be perfectly clear: I grew up with constant corporeal punishment by parents and teachers and I consider the practice abhorrent. But the same people who beat me up for misbehaving, horribly misguided though they were in thinking that's a way to raise a child, were not murderers and would never have gone as far as to cause life-threatening injury. I think this experience also colours my perception of cases like Christina Robinson. There's a sliding slope reasoning in many of those accusations that is very dangerous.

defrost 2y ago

> There is ample evidence of terrible behavior. What about actual hard evidence that Robertson definitely delibrately killed Nikki? Or is "looks like it" good enough for a death penalty in the US? It's nortoriously hard to undead people, eg: had Kathleen Folbigg lived in Texas it seems likely she'd be dead by now. Kathleen Folbigg, who on only circumstantial evidence was famously convicted of killing her four young children and jailed 2 decades ago, had just been pardoned by New South Wales and set free. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-geneticist-led-effort-free-mother-convicted-killing-her-kids https://www.science.org/content/article/how-geneticist-led-e... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Folbigg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Folbigg

banana_feather 2y ago

This misses the point. What you wrote is essentially "witness testifies defendant once shook child in their presence, child died". The magic third ingredient is that the state was allowed to bring in an expert witness to tell the jury that there's a causal link between shaking of the kind observed by the fact witness and the infliction of fatal injuries like those seen in the child. If it turns out no such link actually exists, you sort of have a problem, because the jury heard it either way. Also fwiw, that brief is still an adversarial motion, you cannot expect to get a balanced recounting of the facts by reading the state's motion in opposition.

coldtea 2y ago
>The magic third ingredient is that the state was allowed to bring in an expert witness to tell the jury that there's a causal link between shaking of the kind observed by the fact witness and the infliction of fatal injuries like those seen in the child. If it turns out no such link actually exists, you sort of have a problem That medical description of physical symptoms sounds fine as a "magic third ingredient" between "shaking of the kind observed" and the kid dying. Except if someone who treats a baby like that (as described by the witness) be beyond beating it, or if "bruising on her chin, as well as along her left cheek and jaw, and large subdural hematomas" develop spontaneously...
- marmadukester39 2y ago
  Except if she had a clotting disorder as indicated that might make her bruise and get edemas with much less trauma and say she fell on her face/chin, all of those could happen comparatively easily. I don’t know what happened here and thats the point.
- everforward 2y ago
  You mean the ex who was in a bitter custody battle at the time of the death, whose own sister testified against her? The same one whose parents called him to pick up the child the night before she died? Doesn’t sound like a family that thought he was a child-beating monster. She had no neck trauma when she died. CT scans showed a single blunt impact to the back right of her head, consistent with a fall and strange for a beating. More than all of that, the medical evidence doesn’t even look like she died from the blunt force trauma. She showed up to the ER blue lips, a telltale sign of hypoxia. She had severe undiagnosed viral pneumonia, despite having been to the doctor because we didn’t look at the strain until COVID. Pneumonia impacts breathing function. On top of that, she was prescribed phenergan, an opioid that now carries a warning not to prescribe it to children _because it can make them stop breathing_. On top of that, the day before she died she was prescribed codeine, which now also carries a warning label not to prescribe it to respiratory-depressed children _because it can make them stop breathing_. Lab results show what we now know to be a fatal dose of Phenergan. She died, sadly, as a result of multiple respiratory depressing factors due to a societal failure to ensure medications were safe for children in her situation. The blunt trauma isn’t even relevant; the phenergan and pneumonia would have killed her anyways. This is just the usual villification of an easy target: he’s poor and autistic, he was never going to look good to a jury. They probably could have gotten a conviction for murdering Amelia Earhart if they’d tried.

rossant 2y ago

For fairness you should also point to the defense's petition. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-7546/266633/20230511074854156_Roberson%20Cert%20Petition%20Final%20w%20Tables.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-7546/266633/202... It states, for example: > The Dallas hospital records indicate that Nikki also had a clotting disorder of unclear origin, which made her susceptible to bruising and likely increased the bleeding inside her skull.

lollersk8z 2y ago

Did you check or are you just taking the systems documentation of a known failure as concrete proof? Words really make people believe anything. Asimov covered this in Foundation; if you’re not measuring yourself you’re just a parrot of propaganda.

thebeardisred 2y ago

"Ample evidence" isn't the legal burden. It's a lack of reasonable doubt.

Aloisius 2y ago

> Courtney said that she once An 11 year old child. > Rachel Cox then testified A 10 year old child.