Man Whose Murder Conviction Was Overturned Back in Court for New Evidentiary Hearings

(KNSI) — An Albany man whose murder conviction was overturned will be back in a Stearns County courtroom Tuesday as prosecutors have decided to move forward with a new trial.

Robert John Kaiser was convicted in 2016 of murdering his infant son after prosecutors said the child died of shaken baby syndrome while in Kaiser’s care. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but Kaiser appealed, and his attorneys said he was deprived of his constitutional right to a fair trial. They also said new evidence supports Kaiser’s claims of innocence.

Several independent medical experts looked at the evidence and said there was a medical cause for William’s injuries, and there was no criminal element to it. William had an undiagnosed medical condition known as cerebral venous thrombosis, which causes clotting in the brain’s venous system. He was also administered Propofol in the hospital and placed on a feeding tube, which punctured a portion of the small intestine immediately below the stomach which caused him to develop a serious and often fatal condition involving the disintegration of the bowel, which called into question William’s cause of death.

Defense attorneys argue that none of the State’s medical witnesses disclosed the presence of CVT and insisted that there was no other explanation for William’s deteriorating condition other than abuse.

In 2022, a Stearns County judge overturned Kaiser’s conviction, but prosecutors took their case to the Minnesota Court of Appeals, who upheld the lower court’s ruling in 2023. Prosecutors appealed again, this time to the Minnesota Supreme Court. In March of this year, the panel upheld the two previous decisions, saying, “Here, the State’s experts made statements of medical fact to the jury that proved crucial in establishing Kaiser’s guilt. The district court conducted a thorough 9-day evidentiary hearing and gathered the facts necessary to conclude that the trial testimony was false. And the State’s own witness, in effect, recanted his trial testimony by saying later that it was incorrect.”

The Stearns County Attorney’s Office opted to retry him as the case doesn’t fall under the double jeopardy statute.

A Frye-Mack hearing, which began in October, continues today so the court can determine whether scientific evidence presented by an expert witness is admissible based on a “general acceptance” standard. That means the relevant scientific community must widely accept a scientific theory or technique. There is an added requirement of “scientific reliability” and whether the methodology is considered reliable and accepted within the expert’s field.

His attorneys said they didn’t know why the State was going to take another run at this case because three courts had already ruled that his conviction should be vacated. They also mentioned the considerable cost to taxpayers and that Kaiser had already served much of his sentence imposed by the court.

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