Less than 90 minutes before Robert Roberson was to have been executed by lethal injection in Texas on Thursday evening, first a district judge and then the Texas Supreme Court blocked the state from going through with it. For now, anyway.

The reprieve was unprecedented in that it came in response to a "separation of powers" argument from a group of Republican and Democratic Texas House members. They pulled off something that has not been done before, and deserve all kinds of credit for stopping this travesty.

As I’ve written before, Roberson was convicted of murdering his 2-year-old daughter Nikki in 2003, based on the junk science of what we used to call “shaken baby syndrome.”

In a July interview, the original lead police investigator on the case, Brian Wharton, told me that he knows now that Roberson is innocent, and left law enforcement and became a minister because of his moral misgivings about this and another case.

The Texas lawmakers who bought Roberson some time on Thursday actually did something extraordinary a decade ago. They passed a “junk science law” that allows Texas courts to overturn convictions based on discredited scientific evidence. Shaken baby cases were among those that had convinced lawmakers to pass that law.

This is why both Republicans and Democrats in Austin want the stay of execution, because they want to see their law applied by the court as intended. They had subpoenaed Roberson himself to testify on Monday, and now that can happen.

A Republican friend of mine in Texas, who has been writing letters to Gov. Greg Abbott urging clemency for Roberson, put it this way: “What’s at stake, beyond Mr. Roberson’s life, is whether we will live in a society that will retain even a scintilla of sense.”

If facts don’t matter in matters of life and death, then when?

Texas Democratic Rep. Joe Moody and Republican Rep. Jeff Leach said in a joint statement late Thursday, “For over 20 years, Robert Roberson has spent 23.5 hours of every single day in solitary confinement in a cell no bigger than the closets of most Texans, longing and striving to be heard. And while some courthouses may have failed him, the Texas House has not ... We look forward to welcoming Robert to the Texas Capitol, and along with 31 million Texans, finally giving him − and the truth − a chance to be heard.”

I’m so grateful that Moody, Leach and their colleagues were heard in court, and hope that ultimately, Roberson’s legal team will be, too.

Others fighting for Roberson’s life include the 34 scientific and medical experts who wrote to the clemency board that had Nikki died today, “no doctor would consider Shaken Baby Syndrome” as the cause because the condition “is now considered a diagnosis of exclusion.”

Not always, unfortunately.

But I have written about the shaky science behind “shaken baby” before.

And will again, because innocent parents and caregivers here in Kansas City and across the country continue to be prosecuted for deaths that were the result of natural causes, as Roberson’s daughter’s was. Yes, even as reports of all-too-real child abuse are still too often ignored until it’s too late. “We went from never recognizing child abuse to ‘child abuse is everywhere,’” one of Roberson’s attorneys, Gretchen Sween, told me months ago.

When Roberson rushed his daughter to the hospital after she had collapsed, and was limp and blue, he said she’d fallen off the bed where they’d been asleep in their home in Palestine, in East Texas. But she’d also been quite sick, with undiagnosed pneumonia, and earlier that week, he’d already taken her both to the pediatrician with a high temperature and to the ER.

There were no signs of violence in Roberson’s home, Wharton told me, and Nikki didn’t look like she’d been beaten. But “at the hospital, it seemed like guilt,” in part because Roberson, who has autism, didn’t show the expected outpouring of emotion. “When a parent doesn’t behave ‘correctly’…,’ Wharton’ Then, after a CAT scan, “the hospital came with all the ‘shaken baby’ stuff, so all of the focus was on him. At the hospital, it was all verbal that this was just what this is, and we didn’t have any expertise to question any of that.”

Wharton did have some doubts about some of what they were told: “My initial concern was in the ER, there was a sexual assault nurse who said she’d seen ‘anal tearing.’ I didn’t see anything I would classify as unusual. Nothing else in the investigation supported sexual assault,” either. “Then a snitch comes forward and says (Roberson) confessed to the sexual assault. When (prosecutors) told me the name of the snitch I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ He was a known quantity and not someone you’d depend on for anything.”

Still, “the minuscule evidence of sexual assault did get before the jury. It was just jury manipulation, I’m sorry.” Then, right before the jury was given its instructions, the prosecutor withdrew the sexual assault charge. “I thought it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right, but I thought a decent appellate attorney would have it overturned.” Obviously, that never happened.

Experts have since found and testified that Nikki actually died of severe pneumonia. And we know now that many medical conditions, including pneumonia, can cause the brain bleeding, brain swelling and bleeding in the eyes that still are often seen, incorrectly, as proof positive of child abuse. We also now know that it is impossible to shake a toddler to death without causing serious neck injuries, which Nikki did not have.

How did things get this far? Because we have a criminal justice system that values finality over truth. And too many governors, including Abbott and Missouri’s own Mike Parson, who seem not to believe in mercy even for those who were almost certainly wrongfully convicted.

Courts in Texas kept blocking Roberson on procedural grounds but never looked at how “shaken baby” science has evolved, which again is what Texas lawmakers intended when they passed the “junk science” law way back in 2013.

The state could still set a new execution date, but this reprieve gives Roberson’s team time to get back into state or federal court with new evidence of his innocence.

If, as my buddy in Galveston says, we want to live in a society that will retain even a scintilla of sense, let’s hope they succeed.

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