On October 16, 2025, the State of Texas was scheduled to execute Robert Roberson, a man sentenced to death for allegedly shaking his two-year old daughter, Nikki, so violently she suffered a fatal brain injury. Roberson had always maintained his innocence, insisting Nikki had been gravely ill and fallen off a bed.
Lester Holt first began reporting on the case of Roberson in 2024, when Roberson had previously been scheduled for execution. Over the years, the “shaken baby syndrome” theory underpinning Roberson’s conviction had come under fire. Dozens of medical experts had urged Texas to reconsider the case. Even the detective who led the investigation admitted he had made a mistake. But the Texas Attorney General pressed on and asked a judge to schedule Roberson’s execution anyway.
That’s when Holt traveled to Texas to exclusively interview Roberson on Nightly News, letting him tell his story in his own words to a national audience for the first time. Within a week, that first story grew into a total of five as Holt reported on the dramatic stand-off that developed between a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers supporting Roberson and the Attorney General. On October 17, 2024, Roberson came within 90 minutes of death before the Texas Supreme Court issued a stay of execution. A year later Roberson had a new execution date: October 16, 2025. Holt, who had since retired from Nightly News, decided to return to Texas.
In September 2025, Holt traveled to the town of Palestine where Roberson’s story began, but this time with no cameras. Just Holt, a couple of producers, and a microphone to record his first ever podcast. His team knocked on doors and found people who had remained silent for nearly 23 years: family members, hospital staff, detectives, and attorneys. Without the glare of a camera, doors opened. And because of Holt’s emotional sensitivity and forensic command of the case file, people talked.
A former ER nurse described the chaos of trying to save Nikki. A court clerk recalled discovering long-lost medical records behind a shelf in a basement closet. And Roberson’s original defense lawyer was in disbelief when confronted with trial transcripts revealing he had, in effect, told the jury his own client was guilty.
But the bombshell in the first episode came from Nikki’s grandparents who revealed that they, not Roberson, had been the ones who authorized the withdrawal of Nikki’s life support, and that the judge who allowed them to make that decision, in violation of Roberson’s parental rights, was the same judge who later presided over his capital murder trial.
The major obstacle the reporting team faced was time. Or, more precisely, the lack of it.
The podcast series began production six weeks before Robert Roberson’s scheduled execution in 2025. The usual pressure a reporter faces on deadline, scrambling to track down documents or connect with reluctant witnesses, to corroborate stories and write scripts with nuance and context, was magnified by the knowledge that this deadline truly was final. Adding to the time squeeze was the fact that producers had to navigate rigid institutions, including the prison system. Determined to interview Roberson one last time, they confronted the logistical challenges of a facility that required interview requests to be submitted weeks in advance and allowed interviews to be conducted only once a week. Roberson didn’t have that many weeks left.
The emotional metronome of the series was the countdown to Roberson’s execution. But Holt deftly wove in another timeline: the rise and fall of “shaken baby syndrome” as a clear-cut diagnosis.
In the final episode, Holt interviewed Andrew Roark, a Texas man like Roberson who had been convicted for violently shaking a child. Unlike Roberson, his conviction had been overturned because the court ruled that the diagnosis was “junk science.” By highlighting Roark’s story, Holt painstakingly pointed out the parallels between the two cases, raising questions about whether Roberson’s case should receive the same relief from the court.
When the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted Roberson a stay of execution on October 9, it was Roark’s case the judges said had motivated them.
Few pieces of journalism have halted an execution and saved a man’s life. The Last Appeal has been credited with doing just that.
On the morning of October 6, 2025, ten days before Robert Roberson was set to die, the first episode of The Last Appeal, Holt’s podcast about Roberson’s case was released. It included new information that had never reached a courtroom – or a jury.
Within hours, Roberson’s attorney rushed to court to file a notice of new evidence, explicitly crediting the podcast for uncovering critical evidence.
Then, a few days later, just four hours after the final episode of The Last Appeal dropped, and one week before Roberson was set to be killed, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued Roberson a stay of execution.
The podcast wasn’t part of a campaign, or advocacy, it was an act of rigorous and intrepid journalism that has now given Roberson another chance to be heard.
