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Opinion letter about Robert Roberson, about to be executed in Texas
he case of Robert Roberson, a 57-year-old American scheduled to be executed in Texas on October 17, 2024, along with other cases of supposed infanticides, reflects our tendency to let emotion numb our critical thinking, warns a collective of scientists and legal experts in a tribune for Le Monde. Originally published in French on lemonde.fr on October 1st, 2024.
After a documentary by Sabrina Van Tassel aired in 2021, coupled with international mobilization (in France, she received support from former justice ministers Robert Badinter and Christiane Taubira), her execution was halted at the last minute in 2022. Beyond her expressions of guilt in her diary, experts relied on"Meadow’s Law": the idea that the occurrence of multiple sudden infant deaths in one family is so improbable that it must be concealed murder. Simplistic, seemingly scientific theories, wrongly perceived as absolute truths, lead us to blame scapegoats for tragic events with complex, multifactorial causes—or drive us to even worse outcomes.
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